Browse by

1

Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
WARRIORSAINING GROUND IN MOZAMBIQUE G WAR:' The headline was exotic enough to make the front page of the Chicago Tribune one Sunday.' "Call it one of the mysteries of Africa," the report began. "In the battleravaged regions of northern Mozambique, in remote straw hut villages where the modern world has scarcely penetrated, supernatural spirits and magic potions are suddenly winning a civil war that machine guns, mortars and grenades could not." The account went on to describe an army of several thousand men and boys, sporting red headbands and brandishing spears. Named after their leader, Naparama-who is said to have been resurrected from the dead-they display on their chests [he scars of a "vaccination" against bullets. Their terrain is the battle-scarred province of Zarnbesia, where a civil war, with South African support, has been raging for some fifteen years. Now heavily armed rebels flee at the sight of the Napararna, and government troops appear equally awed. Western diplomats and analysts, the report recounts, "can only scratch their heads in amazement." The piece ends in a tone of arch authority: "Much of Naparama's effectiveness can be explained by the predominance of superstitious beliefs throughout Mozambique, a country where city markets always have stalls selling potions, amulets and monkey hands and ostrich feet to ward off evil spirits." Faced with such evidence, anthropologists might be forgiven for doubting that they have made any impact at all on Western consciousness. It is more than fifty years since Evans-Pritchard (1937) showed, in the plainest prose, that Zande magic was an affair of practical reason, that "primitive mentality" is a fiction of the modern mind; more than fifty years of writing
YSTIC

M

-,

,

3

4

THEORY,

ETHNOGRAPHY,

HISTORIOGRAPHY

Ethnography and the Historical Imagination

5

in an effort to conrextualize the curious. Yet we have not routed the reflex that makes "superstitious" most aptly qualify African belief. No, the straw huts and magic potions are as secure in this text as in any early nineteenth century traveler's tale. There is even the whiff of a traffic in flesh ~the monkey hands; the ostrich feet). No matter that these wayward warriors are in facr the victims of a thoroughly modern conflict, that they wear civilian clorhes and file into combat singing Christian songs. In the popular imagination they are fully fledged signs of the primitive, alibis for an evolutionism that puts them-and their fascinating forays-across an irretrievable gulf from ourselves. These sensationalized savages, thrust across our threshold one snowy Sunday, served to focus our concerns about the place of anthropology in the contemporary world. For rhe "report" told less of the Mozambican soldiers than of the culture that had conjured them up as its inverted selfimage. Despite the claim that meaning has lost its moorings in rhe late capiralist world, there was a banal predictability about this piece. Ir relied on rhe old opposition between secular rnundanity and spectral mystery, European modernism and African primitivisrn.t What is more, the contrast implied a telos, an 'all too familiar vision of History as an epic passage·, from pasr to present. The rise of the West, our cosmology tells us, 'ls accompanied, paradoxically, by a Fall: The cost of rational advance has been our erernal exile from the sacred garden, from its enchanted ways of knowing and being. Only natural man, unreconstructed by the Midas rouch of modernity, may bask in its beguiling certainties. The myth is as old as the hills. But ir has had an enduring impact on post-Enlightenment thought in general and, in particular, on the social sciences. Whether they be classical or critical, a celebration of modernity or a denunciation of its iron cage, these "sciences" have, at least until recently, shared the premise of disenchantment-of the movement of mankind from religious speculation to secular reflection, from theodicy to theory, from culture to practical reason (Sahlins 1976a; n.d.). Anrhropologisrs, of course, have hardly ignored the effects on the discipline of the lingering legacy of evolutionism (Goody 1977; cf Clifford (988). Nonerheless, it remains in our bones, so to speak, with profound implications for our notions of history and our theories of meaning. The mystic warriors underscored our own distrust of disenchantment, our reluctance to see modernity-in stark contrast to tradition-as driving a "harsh wedge between cosmology and history" (Anderson 1983:40). To be sure, we have never given any analytic credence to rhis ideologically freighted opposition or to any of its aliases (simple.complex; ascriprive.achievement-driven; collectivist.individualist; ritualist.rationalist: and so on). For, dressed up as pseudohistory, such dualisms feed off one another, caricaturing the empirical realities they purport to reveal. "Tra-

ditional" cO.mronunities stil! frequently held, for instance, to rest upon are sacred certamnes; modern societies, instead, to look to history to account for themselves or to assuage their sense of alienation and loss (cf. Anderson 19~3:40; Keyes, Kendall, and Hardacre n.d.), What is more, these sterotypic contrasts are readily spatialized in the chasm between the West and the rest. Tr~ as the~ might, the Naparama wilJ never be more than primitive rebels,. rattling their sa~ers, their "cultural weapons," in the prehistory of an Afncan ~awn. As Fields (1985) has noted, their "milleniary" kind are sel?om atrributed properly political motives, seldom credited with the rational, purposive actions in which history allegedly consists. In the event the Western eye frequently overlooks important similarities in the ways in which societies everywhere are made and remade. And all too often we · " ant h ropo Iogists have exacerbated this. For we have our own investment in preserving zones of "tradition," in stressing social reproduction over random change, cosmology over chaos (Asad 1973; Taussig (987). Even as w~ exp~se our ethnograp~ic islands to the crosscurrents of history, we rernarn famth~arted. still separate local communities from global systems, the thick description of particular cultures from the thin narrative of world events.

V'!e.

The bulletproof soldiers remind us that lived realities defy easy dualisms, t~at worlds everywhere are complex fusions of what we like to call moderrury and magicality, rationality and ritual, history and the here and now. In fact, our studies of the Southern Tswana have long proved to us that none ?~th~se '_Vere. pposed in the first place-except o perhaps in the colon~zmg Imagmatlon and in ideologies, like apartheid, that have sprung from It. If we allow that historical consciousness and representation may take very differen~ forms from those of the West, people everywhere turn out to have had history all along. . As it ~s become commonplace to point Out, then, European colonizers dl? not, m an act of heroism worthy of Carlyle (1842), bring Universal ~Isto~y to people with~ut it-Ironically, they brought histories in particular, histones far Jess predictable than we have been inclined to think. For despite the. cla,~msof modernization theory, Marxist dependistas or "mode~ ?f production models, global forces played into local forms and conditions in unex.pected ways, changing known Structures into strange hybrids. Our own evidence shows that the incorporation of black South Africans into a world economy did not simply erode difference or spawn rationalized, homogeneous worlds. Money and commodities, literacy and Christendom challenged local symbols, threatening to convert them into a universal currency. But precisely because rhe cross, the book, and rhe coin were such saturated signs, they were variously and ingeniously redeployed to bear a host of new meanings as non-Western peoples-Tswana prophets, Napararna fighters, and others-fashioned their own visions of modernity (cf.
J

J_

.,
I

is a simultaneous sense of hope and. .
ETHNOGRAPHY. AU that the historian or ethnographer can do. despair intri~ic to et~m?gr~phy! Does its relativism bequeath it an endunng sens~ of its own limitation. history for the "modern" world.postmodernity.
I
. calls for two things simultaneously: that we regard our own world as a problem. all of which repay analysis. it becomes clear that the culture of capitalism has always been shot through with its own magicalities and forms of enchantment.
-Claude Levi·S1ll1l111s(1963a:16-17)
These questions parse into two parts. infects the politics of value everywhere. If such distinctions do not hold up. all the better to understand them both. concepts like the commodity yield useful insights into the constitution of cultures usually regarded as noncapitalist. In our essays. like a classical pas de deux. The best ethnographic study will never make the reader a native . as it were. and political science." They are our own rationalizing cosmology posing as science. case studies. or between economies governed by use. It IS being WIdely appropriated as a liberalizing met~od in . it follows that the modes of discovery associated with them-ethnography for "traditional" communities. and that. in a different context. the current status of ethnography in the human sciences IS.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
7
Clifford 1988:5-6). [I]n both cases we are dealing With systems of representations which differ for each member or the _group and which. step by step. of those marginal to bourgeois reason and the commodity economy.' Are these disciplines h suffering a crlU~al lag? Or. It is. " aIways. they describe :J. soclOl??y. now stand accused of havmg served ~he ~ause of imperialism. an? l~ being. on the other. the second to history. their spirit. . ItS own irony? There does seem to be plenty of evidence for Aijmer's (1988:424) recent claim that ethnography. our culture parading as historical causality. by turns. h as been". enchanted by a "superstitious" belief in their capacity to be fruitful and multiply. is .. IS to enlarge a specific experience to the dimensions 01 a more general one. as Chapter 5 demonstrates. How do we do ethnographies of. cultural and legal studl~S. past and present-also cannot be sharply drawn. or to remoteness In space. assertions that have long justified the colonial impulse. merge slowly. . is of secondary importance compared to the basic similarity 01 perspective. Marx insisted on understanding commodities as objects of primitive worship. even logocentric event histories. just as we need history to know non-Western others. Save in the assertions of our own culture.that appears. and all that we can expect ~f them.. cha~lenge~ from both within anthropology and outs~de. . Like the nineteenth-century evangelists who accused the London poor of strange and savage customs (see Chapter 10).ed. senou~ly. inked with epistemological problems. having taken to the field to subvert Western ~mversalJsms with non-Western particularities. The first pertams to ethnography. In respect of our own society.fields oth~r t~an our own-among them. I' . might be the substantive direcnons of such a "neomodern" historical anthropology?
II
~oth ~istory and ethnograp~y are concerned with societies other than the one In which we ~Ive. SOCial istory. this is especially crucial.As we. Fabian 1983. have not. the canon-fodder of a critical anthropology. two complementary motifs that start out separately ~nd. For ethnography serves at once to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. For it is arguable that many of the concepts on which we rely to descr ibe modern lifestatistical models. to make good this intention. But how
exactly are we to do so? Contrary to some scholarly opinion ' ir ISnot so . . its authority has been. On the one hand. Although these curious goods are more prevalent in "modern" societies. on the whole.6
THEORY. If.ItS ~oundln_g fathers.Whether this otherness is due to remoteness in time . rational choice and game theory. which ac~use It both of fetishizing cultural difference (Asad 1973. is much to be gained from typological eontrasts between worlds of gesellschaft and gemeinschaft. and in. as Marx himself recognized. as others before us have said. indeed. as we follow colonizers of different kinds from the metropole to Africa and back.and exchange-value. Nor. there is no great gulf between "tradition" and "modernity"-or '. calls the "synoptic illusion. But we are less concerned here to reiterate this point than to make a methodological observation. world of densely woven power and meaning. and biographical narratives-are instruments of what Bourdieu (1977:97f). All this. differ from the representations ot the Investigator.. Said 1989) and-because of its relentlessly bourgeois bias-of effacing
-. we develop a genuinely historicized anthropology. in short. Being social hieroglyphs rather than mere alienating objects. And so the dogma of disenchantment is dislodged. I easy to aIienate ourse ves from our own meaningful context ' to rnak e our .. we cast our gaze beyond the horizon where the so-called first and third worlds meet. Neither was (or is) this merely a feature of "transitional" communities. .p~lpable also in critiques of anthropology. uniquely revelatory and irredeemably ethnocentnc. own existence strange. ambivalence. the c~ntemporary world order? What. or even to cultural heterogeneity." for that matter. a proper site for ethnographic inquiry. And generations of journeyman ~nth~opologlsts SInce have struggled with the contradictions of a mode of InqmrY. as many now recognize. more realistically." To WI~. as fetishes. . We require ethnography to know ourselves. The.som~thmg ~f a paradox.

he goes on to assert. are to be heard in other scholarly fields that rely on participant observation: Surveying the growing literature in cultural studies. conceived of as somehow commensurate with our own. Pratt 1985)." But why this enduring ambivalence? Is ethnography. On an unhinged stall door. the observer is selfevidently his/her "own instrument of observation" (Levi-Strauss 1976:35). for example." It lias continued to be. however.
In this . for example.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
9
difference altogether (Taussig 1987).~that statrstrcs can. of subver ting Our Own sureties (cf van der Veer 1990:739). it was "dialogic long before the term became popular. in spite of its sometime scientific pretentious. or their reliance on a depersonalizing gaze that separates subject from object. make an object of the 'other. should ethnographers not give account of how such experiences are socially. is not a vain attempt at literal translation. in which we take over the mantle of an-other's being. But it would surely be wrong to conclude that their method is especially vulnerable. In a recent review. 1968. was frankly celebrated (Foucault 1975. It turned out to be Our first foretaste of deconstruct.'" Nonetheless. or Just a figment of the Tikopean imagination!"? Ethnography. they widely ~ccept that:-ltke all other forms of understanding-ethnography is historically contingent and culturally configured. to extend the point. the "problem" ?f anthropological knowledge is only a m~re tangl~le instance of something common to all modernist epistemologies. its paradox a productive tension. each with its own. Sangren (1988:406) acknowledges that ethnography does "to some degree.f dialogue. condemns us to lesser truths. standardizing strategies. Those presently concerned with the question or authority fault (unenlightened) ethnographers for pretending to be good." Similar arguments. in any case. Yet it might be argued that the greatest weakness of ethnography is also its major strength. without any mediation. the unsympathetic critic could claim that ethnography is a relic of the era of travel writing and exploration. of adventure and astonishmentr" that it remains content to offer observations of human scale and fallibility. 51ndeed. its philosophical unreflectiveness. FigJio 1976). let us have no representa~ion at ~ll!Yet surely this merely reinscribes naive realism as an (unattamable) ideal] Why? Why should anthropologists fret at the fact that our accounts are refractory representations. that they cannot convey an undis~orted sen~e of the "open-ended mystery" of social life as people experience It? Why. recall." In this it is reminiscent of the early biological sciences. To be sure. the inescapable dialectic of fact and value. they remain representa~ons o. with the aim of fructifying our own ways of seeing and being. Unlikely as it may seem.sens. singularly precarious in its naive empiricism.. that biology was the model chosen. the creative potential-of such "imperfect" knowledge. Lakatos and Musgrave. For ethnography personifies.ion. " Still.
ETHNOGRAPHY. where clinical observation. And while it has never been theoretically homogeneous. instead. the term "participant observation" -an oxymoron to believers in value-free science-connotes the inseparability of knowledge from its knower. one might add.: :'modernist': f?rm that.. and quantifying formulas. The discipline. harking back to the classical credo that "seeing is believing. Even if they wanted to. for instance. Thus ~lifford ." would "evoke the world without reprcsentmg It. pace the purifying idyll of ethnoscience. disingenuously. in its methods and Irs models. If we cannot have real representation. Likewise. an unknown artist-perhaps an un~mged student-asked nobody in particular. but about them. as many of its critics have implied. hope to remove every trace of the arbitrariness with which they read meaningful signs on a cultural landscape.e. does not speakfor others. never really developed an armory of objectifying instruments. Neither imaginatively nor empirically can it ever "capture" their reality. that it still depends. as philosophers of science have long realized (Kuhn 1962. because it "can never gain knowledge of the ~eal~tl. For it refuses to put its trust in techniques that give more scientific methods their illusory objectivity: their commitment to standardized.notes that even if our accounts "successfully dramatize the intersubjecrive.lthstandmg the realist idiom of their craft. in the golden age of social anthropology." As if the impossibility of describing the enconnter III all its fullness. It is a historically situated mode of understanding historically situated contexts. it does have strangely anachronistic echoes. perhaps it was where postmodern anthropology all ~egan. the penetrating human gaze. Graeme Turner (1990:178) remarks that "the democratic impulse and the inevitable effect of ethnographic practice in the academy contradict each other. as Evans-Pritchard (1950. Marcus (1986:190) counterposes "realist ethnography" to a ne. ethnographers could not. They tend both to r~cogr:ize the i~possibil!ty of the true and the absolute and also to suspend disbelief Not:. In anthropology. Yet most.
l
. living with insecurity is more tolerable to some than to others. (961) insisted long ago." They have even at times found the contradiction invigorating. Ethnography. of its practitioners persist in asserting the usefulness-indeed. to know human (or even nonhuman) worlds.
-.. "Is Raymond Firth real. internal differences and disputes have seldom led to thoroughgoing revisions of its modus operandi. its interpretive hubris? Methodologically speaking. here.(l988:~3) . for a "natural science of society" (Radcliffe-Brown 1957). this was brought home to us in a London School of Economics toilet in 1968. and historically grounded or argue about the character of the worlds they evoke. culturally. give-and-take of fieldwork . This is the whole point. on the facticity of first-hand experience. Levi-Strauss 1976:35. a priori units of analysis. a humanist art. old-fashioned realists..8
THEORY. more so than other efforts.

to pick. systems appear "impersonal. Thus many anthropologists have been wary of ontologies that give precedence to individuals over contexts.
I
. in the making of our texts. we have to situate them within the systems of signs and relations. They. Yet It IS precisely this perspective that wa~ra~ts the call for et..~nograp~y ~o be "dialogical"-so that we may do Justice to the role of the native informant.~ discou:se. see below). in our culture. decontextualized exchange between anthropologist and informant. a process that need privilege neither the sovereign self nor stifling structures. impersonal systems.10
THEORY.. under whose wing ethnography may find a precarious perch (e.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
11
perhaps radically different. world-systems.f. the rendering down of social science to the terms of the experiencing subject is a product of modern humanism.. agency. their words and winks and more
besides. Nor are contexts just there. it has hitherto been an inescapably Weste. ethnocentric interview. 14). have to be constructed analytically in light of our assumptions about the social world. liberation struggles. it entails observation of activity and mteraction both formal and diffuse. it is impossible ever to rid ourselves entirely of the ethnocentrism that dogs our desire to know others." the communing of phenomenologically conce~ved actors throu~h talk alone. ethnography objectifies as it ascribes meaning-albeit perhaps less so than do those methodologies that explain human behavior in terms of putatively universal motives. for ambivalence and historical indeterminacy-:-when we fail to acknowledge that meaning is always. evangelism." in short. in the work. of P?wer and meaning. one can "do" ethnography in the archives. although the latter is always part of ~he former. is not untenable in "the narrative space of ethnography" (Marcus 1986: 190). to some extent.s maximizing man to Geertz's maker of meaning. claiming the ~ormer for anthropology while leaving the latter to global theories (MarxIsm. That spirit is present. up our earlier comment. including scholars. of modes of control and constraint.hose sIgn~ that disguise themselves as universal and natural.or. from Mahnowsk. "The representation of larger. An exacting critic from a neighboring discipline recently allowed that the work of anthropol-
-
. its inquisitive spirit calls upon us to ground subjective. and history. To treat eth~ogtaphy as an encounter between an observer and an other-Conversat. the parody of doxa-to confront the lImIt~ of our own ~~lsternology our own visions of personhood. bodies. Comaroff and Comaroff 1991.'? We would resist the reduction of anthropological research to an exercise in "intersubjecti vity. of course. Our concern ultimately is with the interplay of such systems-often relatively open systems-with the persons and events they spawn. but in the narrower sense of a dyadic. Generations of anthropologists have said it in a wide variety of ways: In order to construe the gestures of others. anthropological fold. as Darnton (1985:3) implies by the phrase "history in the ethnographic grain" (see p. as we shall point out again below. who live in different wor~ds. It has proven extremely difficult to cast the bourgeois subject o~t of t~. expenencmg subjects from the conditions that produce them. of a historically specific Western world view. ethnographers also read diverse sorts of texts: books. Such systems seem impersonal and unethnographic only to those who would separate the "subjective" from the "objective" world. In it. only when we exclude from them all room for human maneuver. Ironically." the singular subject.anthropol?gy . But they must always grve texts contexts and assign values to the equations of power and meaning they express. and society are the . Marcus 1986).(Du~ont 197~)--:-is to make anthropology into a global. culturally configured action in society and history-and vice versa-wherever the task may take us. In this sense. social . culture becomes the stuff of intersubjective fabrication: a web to be woven." and holistic analyses stultifying.
ETHNOGRAPHY. phenomenon" (Le Golf 1988:5' our emphasis).g. that social life everywhere rests on the imperfect ability to reduce ambiguity and concentrate power. And ethnography becomes "dialogical. For all this. But more than this: Ethnography surely extends beyond the ran~e ~f the empirical eye.. buildings.ons with Ogotemmeli (Griaule 1965) or The Headman an~ I ." Sangren (1988:416) argues VIgorously that this is a legacy of American cultural . One can also "do" the anthropology of national or international for~es and formations: of colonialism. even though we vex ourselves with the problem in ever more refined ways. like all forms of inquiry. In addition to talk. Apart from all else. Yet. S/he has returned in many guises. we would argue. s/he ~~pears again in the writings of those who take ethnography to task for faIh~g to represent the "native's point of view. that animate them. Of course. that economy. regional "development. Also. too. whether or not we recognize them. _objects and objectives." and the like. Ethnography. of engaging m unsettling exchanges with those. of silence as well as assertion and defiance. such systems are implicated. Such crtnques can nev'er be full or final. a text to be transcribed. in the sentences and scenes we grasp with our narrowgauge gaze. Along the way. structuralism). As Hindess (1972:24) remarks.. of decod~ng t. Under these conditions. we tell of th~ ~nfamillar-agam." not in Bakhtin's thoroughly socialized sense.. the version of it that would sever culture from society. for they remain embedded in forms of thought and practice not fully conscious or innocent o. dispersed diasporas. SOCIalmovements. kinds of subj~cts and subjectivities.aggregate ~roduct ~f individual action and intention. that human beings can triumph over their contexts through sheer force of will. at least. we shall see. For these rest on manifestly Western assumptions: among them. sometimes even cities (Holsto~ 1989. In fact. the paradox. culture. ~ut they provide one way.f constrai~t. is an exercise in dialectics rather than dialogics. of historians who insist that the human imagination itself is perforce a "collective. arbitrary and diffuse.

~ow could we not ~e appealed to by. so to speak. the subject matter Obviously remote. statistically or logically conceived. indspefakid'~ffig folr. for reasons deeply inscribed in the politics of knowledge. to disregard the challenge that cultural re lativisrn poses to bourgeois consciousness. sought to wrue "general histories" in "numbers and anonymlty. e "more" historical. broa~Iy speaking.!' Bur there was mor~ t~ t. Such studies in fhistoire des men:alith~3 are not j~St chronicles of the quotidian. to answer back. we comprehend and control. and can acknowledge the effects of history upon our discourses. Then. Bound to b. strife between states. not in unverifiable subjectivities. It also calls for a careful consideration of the real implications of what we do. mora an p I osop tear. our own as much as those we study. As
i
i
'1
. or history "more" anthropological may be b well-inrenrioned: but .' rheoretlcal. those imposed by academic brokers on communities without cultural capital are more likely to have deleterious consequences. We ought not be too quick. ethnography seems no more intrinsically "arrogant" than do other modes of social investigation (pace Turner 1990: 178). anthropologists have classically studied populations marginal to the centers of Western power-those who were unable.of th?se disciplines-if any such rhing exists-but by prior rheore~lcal onslderanons.emuch more attractive.others anld thdeirh~ol 0h~viel our. it became common to temper the ~nthropo~oglCal turn toward history-as-panacea by posing the problem: W~at history? Which anthropology?" We ourselves raised the issue argumg that ' ~ny. is the question of history.counts of past worlds that. Clearly. of "little people" and. "which combiners] a passion for detail with a humane aspiration. for contexts.hould. we will be on epistemological turf that.' .
*
*
*
~he s~cond motif. in similar ways. since there should be no division to begin ~Ith.It would seem obvious. In this. or vice versa. of embassies among empires. by appeal to synchronic ~oclOlogy.he matter than this. our position is little different from that of often radical social historians concerned with society's nether regions. recall. Or. Then we may focus on interpreting social phenomena.
1
I
I
I
I
f
-. of societies and selves. we have to confront the complexities of our relations ro our subjects. however fascinating. it now seems) pervaded by a p~rtlC~lar Gmt-a politics of perspective. for instance. the kind of hlst." But ethnography also has positive political possibilities.that historical c analysis assumes diffierent sigrnificance for structura I"functionalists rhan It . In the lat. Hill 1972). we may traffic in analytic constructions. An important moment of choice is now upon us. Hence to assert [hat anthropology s. cf.
I
. we evade the issue of representation and experience altogether.e 1970s and early 1980s. although its legitimacy and impact vary with the way in which we choose to phrase our questions. until recently. At the very least. were richly textured accounts of things similar to what we ourselves st~dy-an~lyzed. If the description was suitably thick. finally. IS hard!y a theory at all. Then. orders and events-then we open ourselves to conventions of criticism widely shared by the non positivist human sciences. once again. Much of the difficulty has come from the fact that. nor-:-like their even more everyday English equivalenrs-c-are they merely studies of "the experience of living men and women" (Thompson [1978a] 1979:21. in space and time. we seek to understand the making of collective worlds-the dialectics. Why else the special opprobrium heaped upon us by shrill absolutists. Nevertheless. and audiences-especially because the impact of our work is never fully foreseeable. Thomas 1971. as we will argue. does not suffer in comparison with its ethnocentric competitors" (Fields 1985:279). Indeed.substantive relationship between disciplines is determined not by the lntnnsl~ nature.[In our view] there ought to be no "relationship" b~rweenhistory and anthropology. Neither were they liable to be event~full pO. But if. This not only demands a serious regard. the asser tiIon remains vacuous without further . or trade between chieftains' nor latt:r-day quantitative ac."12 . not on the endless quest for textual means to exorcise the fact that our accounts
are not re~list transparencies. then ordinary pracnces.12
THEORY. .ones that were to fi~d a sympathetic ear among anthropologists were unlikely to be the Chronicles of Courts and Kings.us no int w' en 0 I cu ties. save in some structuralist and Marxist circles. does for either Marxists or structuralists. Ifwe take our task to be an exercise in intersubjective translation. too. If only provisionally. hubris will cause .litical narratives.. a consideration th~t' must go far beyond the now routine recognition that our writings are potential instruments of "othering.. texts. the lives of "little people" viewed from the bottom up (Cohn 1987:39). after an older European tradition..specification.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
13
ogy. essayists of the closed mind like Alan Bloom? The fate of the Naparama may tell us that we are less influential than we often suppose. for example. more precisely.
ETHNOGRAPHY. while all representations have effects. A theory of society which is not also a theory of history. persons and places. A If we see it to lie III the nd formal analysis of social systems or cultural structures. In this respect. so much the better. Carlo Ginzburg's (1983) tale of sixteenth-century witchcraft and agrarian cults in Europe. . . The dangers of disclosure in such situations are real enough. . say. For the space of intersection bet~een the ~wo dlscl~l~nes was (inevitably. our work does reverberate in and beyond the academy. or his account (1980) of the cosmos of a contemporary miller. of historical anthropology.

it became common to tem er the ~.e 1970s and early 1980s. t eory of society which is not also a rheor f hi . stnre between states ' or trade betwee n . the lives of "little people" viewed from the bottom up (Cohn 1987:39). Neither were the liable to am be event-full political narratives ' however fascinating . in . And if we see it to lie in the formal analysis of social systems or cultural structures. a consideration :tbat must go far beyond the now routine recognition that our writings are potential instruments of "othering.emuch more attractive. we evade the issue of representation and experience altogether. In this respect. moral and philosophical.e ~~~r~~c:l conslder~tions. sixteenth e not ~e appealed to by. is the question of history. [ he assertion remains vacuous wirhout .at history? WhICh anthropology?" We ourselves raised the issue' arguing t at ' ~ny.efurrhe . Hill 1972). persons and places." But ethnography also has' positive political possibilities. As
. An important moment of choice is now upon us. once again. cf Thomas 1971. For the space of intersection b~t~een the ~wo dlsCl~I~neswas (inevitably. It also calls for a careful consideration of the real implications of what we do. soug t to wrtte "general histories" in "nu b ers an d anonymIty. texts..lUhe description was How could we t e su jeer matter obviously remote. recall.0 f emYb .were richly textured accounts of things similar to what we ourselves :u~t~lY ~~:~rze~ bro~~IY speaking.I[. But if. so much the better. statistically or logically conceived. and can acknowledge the effects of history upon our discourses. in space and time.ay quanntanve accounts of past worlds that by I hroni soc' 1 ht to wri ' appea to sync roruc . does not suffer in comparison with its ethnocentric competitors" (Fields 1985:279). say.su.
ETHNOGRAPHY. we seek to understand the making of collective worlds-the dialectics. essayists of the closed mind like Alan Bloom? The fate-of the Naparama may tell us that we are less influential than we often suppose. . Ogylls.since [here should be no division to begin wit.21. [In our view] there ought to be no "rell[ionship'~ ~r:e~n hIstoryand a. for reasons deeply inscribed in the politics of knowledge.chire ft ams: nor d a er. too. In the lat.~ . Or more precisely of " h istonca anthropology. Indeed.. more historical. not in unverifiable subjectivities. anthropologists have classically studied populations marginal to the centers of Western power-those who were unable. This not only demands a serious regard. [hat hi:r!:~~~ ys: ~shumes l~erent significance for structural functionalists than it d Marxists or stru ct Urali sts. nor. our work does reverberate in and beyond the academy. th . to answer back. it now seems) pervaded b a P. those imposed by academic brokers on communities without cultural capital are more likely to have deleterious consequences. ' h istones unlik 1 t b were to find ashympat etic ear among anthropologists were . Why else the special opprobrium heaped upon us by shrill absolutists. If we take our task [0 be an exercise in intersubjective translation.similar way:s. for instance. ur t at. Much of the difficulty has come from the fact that. not on the endless quest for textual means to exorcise the fact that our accounts
are fnot realist I finally: we '11 b e on epistemological .oucts and Kings. Nevertheless. our own as much as those we study.nthrop~logy. ~ound to b."12 m . we may traffic in analytic constructions.' but .. to disregard the challenge that cultural relativism poses to bburgeois consciousness. 10 ogy. of societies and selves.~~oP~I.. Then we may focus on interpreting social phenomena. . But there was mor~ t? t~e matter than this. . until recently. ley to e t e Ch~~mc1esof C.. Clearly the kinlof r at h . '"
"\
"
.tIC~larhGelSt-a politics of perspective.
*
*
*
T. I on y provisionally.he s~colnd motif. specification. our hubris will cause us no end of difficulties.'"". (1980) of the c witchcraft and agrarian c~ I' IU Europe.bstantiverelationship between disciplines is determined not by th Intnnsl~ nature . or vice versa. toward history-as-panacea by posing the p:Oblem' . for example. and audiences-especially because the impact of our work is never fully foreseeable. or his account ts des mentatites osmos ~f a conte~porary miller. after an older European tradition. .
. we comprehend and control. in speaking for others and their point of view. "Co assies . Then "WI . The dangers of disclosure in such situations are real enough.. I ttong empires.og1Cal turn.12
THEORY.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Eth1l(!graphyand the Historica] Imagination
13
ogy.. so to speak.'! y 0 rsrory. .of those disciplines-if any such thing exists-but b . In this.
. Then. save in some structuralist and Marxist studv. "which combine[s] a passion for detail with a humane aspiration. is hardly a theory at all. Such studies in l'bistoire 13 hei di are not Just chromcles of the quotidian of "little people" and r eir or actices: equivalents mary hp racnces. At the very least. We ought not be toO quick. We have to confront the complexities of our relations to our subjects.I b eoretlc~. for contexts. although its legitimacy and impact vary with the way in which we choose to phrase our questions. orders and events-then we open ourselves to conventions of criticism widely shared by the non positivist human sciences. t h 'f transparencies. ethnography seems no more intrinsically "arrogant" than do other modes of social investigation (pa&e Turner 1990: 178). while all representations have effects.like thei even more' everyday English e their women" (Thare t ey[merely studies of "the experienc« of living men and ompson 1978a] 1979. Carlo Ginzburg's (1983) tale of -century . H ence to assert that anthro I· does lor ert er " ".hould. our position is little different from that of often radical social historians concerned with society'S nether regions. or history "more" anthropological mayPOb be we -intentioned:. as we will argue.wo~ldseem obvious.

of the English noveh.too Simple. in fact.subaltern can speak at all. was far less Important to the making of an epoch than.adl~ahz~~ .n~ might suggest that horses were more interesting to study than politicians and. that there is no point III the discursive structure of Western rationalism from which an interrogation of abnormality may proceed. often well dead and buried. ~oth revisionist and radical. and the cultural riches of non-Western populations. not least. in making his case against history as the biography of big rnen. Derrida (1978:35-36) adds: "All our European lan. Not only do scholars work increasingly on history-inthe-rnaking (cf.. more appealing. even through the texts of a .impulse of our own craft.. Nothing within this language.st L. from ne~r ~r fa~. says Dernd~ (197~:3~f) in dis~issing Foucault's History (1967). the power of parliaments. by an alleged "madman. Yet It barely rates a footnote in any major work. of valued things. Yet this IS t~e very langl!age that constitutedJolie in the first place~hevery . P. the Battle of Trafalgar. Darnton. Take. [T]he revolution against reason
. as significantly. therefore.h~story. as we have noted.ttaillou from within. bears more [han passing similarity to colonial hisroriography in the so-called subaltern
mode. . say.nt "others. we grasp the constitution of compl. who champion the cause of' historical populations .. likens his perspective to that of a colonial anthropologist.he peasa~ts of.guages.i"! However it is Raphael Samuel (1989:23) who probably comes closest to us in spirit. this is the first step in a subversive historical sociology. but also anyone who writes of times past ~ust ~ecogn~ze that ther~ will be people who stand to suffer from the way In which SOCIal emory ISfixed (cf. It is to make a profound methodological point. family. Cultural historians like Le Roy Ladurie. for example. make no apologies for-disinterring and disseminatin~ the ~ive~of insignifica.Rosaldo.ex social fields. Social history may seem less vulnerable to counterattack: Its subjects. like the historians of high politics.
I
. [in which even] the best interpreters still remain biased srrangers. It appears that. extending the concept of commodity fetishism to explore how cattle give analytical access to a changing Southern Tswana universe. In fact. In addition there are m those. those ~ro~bled by the tyranny of a totalizing social science. the liberal urge to speak for others has had Its comeuppance. Jacques Derrida's critique of Foucault's history of madness and. moreover.ltern historiography also challenges the very categories through which colonial pasts have been made. A pro~uct of drawn-out social struggle. But most fundamentally. 10 the adventure of Western reason [are implicated in the objectification of madness].mean~ of ItS repression. for the construction of modern British society tout court. We ourselves follow this object lesson in Chapter 5. a histo. mesmerized by the glamour of power. Le Roy Ladurie (1979~ deX:I~eshIS narrative primarily from the standpoint of a contemforary mqUISItOr. that. Hartley: For these historians "the past is another country where things are done differently . SUba. they also "[treat] our own civilization in the same way that anrhropologists study alien cultures:" Hobs~awm (1990:47-48) puts ir in the words. in the career of everyday goods. can neither answer ~ack nor be a~ected any longer by the politics of knowledge. it resonates with the democra~izing . They are also salient m light of our own analysis (Chapter 6) of the historical consciousness borne. This event. Mor. Samuel voices the same concern as we did about an anthropology "from the native's point of view": that it tends to focus on individual intention and action at the expense of more complex social processes. In ant~ropology. In so doing.. natives. Both are instructive for anthropologists-especially for those drawn by deconstruction. he says. But the intention here is not to Jest at the expense of poimcians or historians. to analyze dementla. the act had critical consequences for marnage." people who have left few documentary traces of Promethean car~ers. at least for younger children. cultural historians are on no firmer episternological ground than are ethnographers-and no less embroiled in the politics of the present (Croce [l921JI959:46f). Ashforth 1991). Ginzburg.'~ Perhaps for anthropologis~s. ~s well. more or less. wryly: "If one were not. It follows.. Thus Rosaldo (1986) contends that. because of Nelson's ~eroic death. and the might of monarchies. This calls to m~nd. they see virtue in-indeed. living or dead.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography lind the Historical Imagination
IS
Darnton (1985:3) notes..ry written against the hegemony of high bourgeoisies. especially those threatened with ethnocide.14
THEORY. .. claims Samuel.o. ISmuch. Their work. Arguing for the kind of history that might best be taught in British schools.. and gender in late nineteenth century England-in . "Cherchez ta vacbel" says Evans-Pritchard of the world of the N uer-advice offered on the same conviction. for all his efforts to captu~e the hfe-wor~d of t. which looms large in standard British textbooks.other words. can escape .
ETHNOGRAPHY. in ~partheid South Africa. the language of everything that has participated." For many of them. the consciousness. the Married Women's Property Act of 1882. This. s~ve In the restrained and restraining language" of Western reason. Bundy 1987). and Samuel give us comfort in the face of less friendly interlocutors partly because they reassure us that our methods ("suspiciously like literature" to the hard social sciences [Damron 1985:6]) are more rigorous and revealing than they appear. As Samuel shows. the move from cavalry charge to hay wain and horse-gin.. and no one among those who speak it. from sporting prints to the text of Black Beauty) lays bare the cultural texture of an age.. Ginzburg's rejoinder. in ~epresenting the point of view of . far from an act of domination or appropnation. This is not merely because the latter concerns itself with "faceless masses. however. Spivak (1988) goes yet further: She questions wh~th~r the . of which we have already spoken: the well-tntentioned-so_me would say self-satisfied-view that ethnography celebrates the narratives." It is impossible.

are all mirrors of dist~rti?n..." then.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
17
can only be made within it . of course the way in v. silence (cf.. w~lCh.spite his location within the discourses of Western reason. It is one thing to acknowledge the possibility that rupture.' . However. t~at IS.oun~ed in the singular. though. This should have warned us that they were in as much theoretical trouble as we were ourselves.16
THEORY.:xxvi) '. concludes Ginzburg. Said 1978). In practice.. For all the cultural historian can ever "see" are the dispersed fragments of an epoch-just as the ethnographer only "sees" fragments of a cultural field. but quite another ~o ensure that it does. the surveyor and the surveilled-on which colonizing power/knowledge is based. lfratlonahty.m the sense of being restored to a world of meaningful wterconnectlons. "hidden histories" have to be situared in the wider worlds of power and meaning that gave them life. play against one another and against the "totality" (posited. Foucault did succeed in using the history of madness. its subaltern variants. there is relevance for us 10 the methodological implications of Ginzburg's argument. the politics of sanity. as we show in Part Three. the stories of ordinary people past stand in danger of remaining just that: stories. . Just as we were turning to history for guidance.. And so his act of subversion disappears before the deconstruct.h~c~the slle?ces and spaces between events are filled. De. ~o take the point further.
. In fact. as if"theory" were an affectation only of those of philosophical bent (Thompson 1978b. absur~ity. Collingwood (1935:15) might have asserted..s of . It allows little by way of legitimate reaction: macnon. too. We should not draw false comfort from this. appears entrapped in Western reason. in particular. lives.between subject and object. for all its brilliant achievements. long ago.
ETHNOGRAPHY. do we connect parts to "totalities"? How do we redeem the fragments? How do we make intelligible the idiosyncratic acts. But to recognize and respect that unintelligib~lity. And here is the ~econd point: there is no basis to assume that the histories of the repressed. rupture. becomes a cul-de-sac and loses its subversive potential.. contradiction in the face of dominant cultures. or resistance ~ay discloseeven disable-the world from which It emanates.redeeming t~e~. through which disjointed stones are cast into master narratives. many historians began to repay the compliment. angles fr. was itself pure fol~y. Its analytic ~aze. To Ginzburg (1980:xvii).15 Even worse. the cultural historian is no less prone than the cultural anthropologist to read with an ethnocen-
-~ . Ginzburg'S insistence on the redemptive connection between fr~gmen. Just as we were inclined to see history as "good"-as if time might cure everything-they seemed to see ethnography as a panacea. it is the relations between fragments and fields that pose the greatest analytic challenge. the point of recovering these fragments-be they individuals or events-is to "connect [them] to an historically determinate environment and society" (1980:xxiv)." But the~e has be~n relatively little effort to interrogate the constructs through w. much historiography still proceeds as if its empirical bases were self-evident. without SOmelarger framework .. at the moment when our early paradigmatic foundations were crumbling. absurdity. The parallel with the politics of ethnography is obvious." Improperly contextualized. ironic mddferenc~. must be achieved by critical thinking. . Not that this should be a surprise. of disinterrng a typical seventeenth-century European villager or nineteenth-century urban merchant." It is. ISthe fabrication of events.' a disturbance. Holquist 1981:xix). . Foucault ISaccused of self-delusion. As this suggests. and representations of others? How do we locate them within "a historically de:e~minate. History.y~ay come to us largely by chance and may in some meas~re be unmtelhglble.we have perfor~e to do "does not mean succumbing to a foolish fascmatlon for the exotic and i~comprehensible. implies Derrida. cf. these partial. The first echoes Samuel's
(1989:23) observation that" 'History from below' . as we are reminded by old debates over l'bistoir« evenementielle (see below). The corollary: There is no great historiographic balance that may be restored. the discourses of the dominant also yield vital insights into the contexts a~d p~ocesse~ of which they were part. To become something more. other signifying practices." For all his determination to wnte a history o~ msarnty "without repeating the aggression of rationalism.om whl~h a~e exposed the logic of oppressive signs and reigrnng hegemonies. to unmask the coerciveness of convention and (self-)discipline. realized) that gives them meaning.madness. as for ethnography. other texts. rather. so. Liberated... Johnson 1978). How. hold a special key to revelation. For historiography. too. But those worlds were also home to other dramatis personae.ety ~s re~resented by [the] victims of social exclusion. to undertake . runs out of answers for us. it misses the fact that "the only d~sco~rse that constitutes a radical alternative to the lies of constituted socI. for Bakhtin (1981:263.repr~SSl~n. against all the force. Anronio Gramsci reminds us...lYe eye. III themselves. must be ~r.m ~he world.ts and totalities brings together two critical points about cultural history 10 general and. the project.. For. The latter. Derrida ~ Cfl~lqueIS both f~Clleand nihilistic. by definition." Extran~ousness. in the kind of history to which it is dedicated. [and] always has ~he limi~ed scope ?f . ~6The.:hichthe "historical imagination" does its work is culturally crafted. It can make no pretense of representativeness. that the "points between which the historical imagination spins its web . however. is made in the struggle among the diverse life worlds that coexist in given times and places-between the "tendentious languages" that. For "redeemed [they are] thus liberated" (1980. a party to the very reiatlonshIP. environment"? It is here that cultural history. More immediately. set to rights once and for all. merely by replacing bourgeois chronicles with subaltern accounts-by "topping and tailing" cultures past (Porrer 1989:3). then.

images. But It IS quite another thing to arrogate to ourselves an exclusive. and practices (see below). from the way in which we call the question. are scripted "in accordance . Recall Thompson's (1978b:324) admonitory metaphor-a little . and colonizers-we follow Croce's ([1921] 1959:51) usage herel~-are distortions. a conceit. as we have suggested:is ent'ire1y 1eglt1~ate. the now familiar'line that marks out the limits of authority. is one to be found by surveying existing historiographies and choosing the most congeni~l candidate. The first recalls Malinowski's (e. 1S Itself a myth-worse. even stratified) histories and worldmaps. the most striking thing
I
-t
. audibly-for the contemporary s~ape of their world. How often do we not explain away their failure to act in their own interest or to act at all by " see king to show that they perforce rnisrecognize the "real" signs and structures t~at ~~stain their subordination? In so doing. the mute and the muzzled. in other words. will reveal itself as we proceed: Some ground clearing is necessary If we are to cut fresh pathways through old thickets. cast out or consumed.question in the negative voice-by disposing. psychoanalysis. generational.
'"
The disti. the work of dispassionate observers.pology.the past as perceived. ~ong ?efore culture Was seen to be a fluid. conquerors. cultural history has been especially adept at revealing 'that all social fields are domains of contest. In the absence of principled theory.g. ethnographers of tfihed~rchi:e
and the field alike tend to become hermeneu~s by default. we must find our own way through the maze of conundrums that lies along the road to a principled historical anthropology. discord. toward what kind of historical anthropology do we strive? And how.The method in our malice. But eventually we must part company. Cohn 1980. which go back much further than we often realize (see. in much historical anthropology.". social knowledge is never value-free or priceless.ong the fault lines of power. that it is possible to recover from fragmen~s.orical anthr<:. the pl~r~l-in thei~ appropriate context. by the dispossessed and the disenfranchised. perishables casually bought or brushed aside. That. between "Ideological" and "objective" history. and even from silences. pure ideology in servitude to power. as we should all be aware by now. Nor. a confrontation of signs and practices al. 1948:92~) ~escription of myth: It is the past as told by people to account--:-authontatlvely.g. He wrote. often contested. after all. does ethnography fit into it? It follows.. there may be alternauve (gendered. and only partially mtegrated mosaic of narratives.
L~t us begin ~o answe: the .ago. on an increasingly global legacy of social thought. more than ~ny other social sci~ntists who validate our endeavor as ethnographers. by the less deterministic visions of a Gram~cl or a Foucault or to such "counternarratives" as feminism. it is all too easy to cross an invisible boundary.
ETHNOGRAPHY. e.shop.n history. with which-at least in Britain-it has had a rich conversation (see Turner 1990:68f' John~on 1979). implicitly. For it is one thing to assume that no human actor can ever "know" his or her world in its totality. to invoke the memory of Edmund Leach ~1961:2). is cultural historians. And there are no "universal criteria of connexion and sequence'" vide Joan Kelly'S (1984) feminist critique of orthodox practices of periodization in Euro~ea. They have drawn.
:v
So with all this in mind.. What in sum are the lessons to be taken from this excursion into history? 'Clearly i.nction. with universal critera of ~on~e~ion and sequence. n mg. Given the reluctance of historians to reflect or: matters of theory their tendency to look to empirical solutions for analytic problems. one tha~ focu~es primarily on little people and the If worlds: LIke cultur~1 studies. from the bottom up. But it remains deeply entrenched In Western popular discourse and. and subalternisrn. that "culture" is often a matter of argument.. Indeed. of the kinds of historical anthropology that we seek specifically to aVOId. "factual" chronicles. L.. 10 interpretive anthropology a confirmation of thel~ own phenomenolo~1Cal individualism. one thing to situate the natives' points of view-note now. Man~ y~ars. ethnographic and historical alike.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography Rnd the Historical Imagination
19
eric eye. J. tha~ IS. Comaroff 1984' Rosaldo 1986). more factual? The same is true of . 1981.18
THEORY. the corollary being that our version is more objective. emancrparorv. ways of knowing. are not like objects rn a supermarket. before e even perceived that. already well inscribed in social theory and philosophy. Nadel (1942:72) drew the attention of anthropologists to the dlst~nCtlon. This they do by asserting the ~ossibility of a subversive hist. between ideological and objective history may no longer go unquest~oned In the musings of metahistorians. authenticaHy." Nadel did not go on to point out that "ideological history rarely exists (or ever existed) in the singular. To dredge up the lexicon of an age gone by. that we do not find a ready answer in the methods and models spawned by the recent rapprochement of history and anthropology-or by its intellectual precursors. in a single African society.:ornr:ow. but still valuable-that ideas. By Contrast. Universal historiography. Of those who did turn to systematic approaches=-especialiy to some form of structuralism or materialism-many have been attracted~ in the wake of recent crises. How often are we not at pains to show that the chronicles of kings. suprahis~orical purchase on reality. as our brief excursion into l'histoire des mentalith indicates. the raw material with which to wnte imaginative sociologies of the-past and the present. exactly. to which we anthropologists have equal access.

It is highly provisional and reflexive. or foug~t with one another.g. when Leach (1961)..lty . were based on perceptive.. ~tsp01~t was to verify. their actions were always seen to reinforce the system in place." Note-the grammatIcally awkward tense shift from historical past to ethnographic present: I~ recapitulates the methodologically uneasy move from data to generalization. that is-is
how
parochial it is. But nobody. how matenalIties matenalIze.lme. But our objective. or an essentialist. that there were three 19 quite different forms of historiography being discussed.. like the objective of many other~. Symbolic. see Chapter 4). These were the days w:hen Evans-P~itchard (1950. 14 .20 about the very idea-the
THEORY.to~ture~ story of state formation. Meillassoux 1981). of h~stonography . captures w:ell the spirit ~f t~e . although they were often cited as proof that.nction between the ideological and the objective is to appear in hls:oncal anthropology at all. Quite the opposite. anti-objecnvut. This reduction was not purel~ the preserve of British functionalism: It was to reappear later. If a . we had empirical J~st~ficatlo? fo~ the claim that the "principle" of primogeniture obtains. Let us explain what we mean with reference. by way of Braudel (e. is to show as cogently as possible haw they are consrructe~: ~w reaht~es. Altogether more recognizably "historical.sc~ltural registers. that successio? among the Zulu had actually passed ~ro~ fat~er to senior ~on a certain number of times.. In the S?uthern Tswana chiefdoms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. . Not only do they invite us to reify msntunons. to our intellectual heritage.18 It is dear. .nt ~s objectivist. consigned to the uneventful register of "structural t. how essences become essential. statistical appearances. If our historical anthropology is anti-empiricist." However much human beings railed against the contradictions of th~u world.~gom] political order. T? the degree that our analytic"strategy may still cou.?me rea~..urmese men had married the daughters of their mothers brothers m a gwen proportion of cases. thus endowing a slippery abstraction with false co~creteness. Perhaps this IS the hallmark of a neomodernis t anthropology.fou?ded on the "anonymity of numbers" (see p. and so a l~ng. ir is primarily as a cultural artifact. history. invoking Maitland (1936:249). bec. 1961:20). in spite of our claims to the contrary. our historical anthropology begins by eschewing the very possibility of a realist. antiessentialist-except in the amended sense in which we deploy these termsit is also anti-statistical and anti-aggregative. . early days of the controversy in Britain over the relationship between history and anthropology. . It mvites the Justifiable criticisms raised most recently by postmodernIsm but also by many ~e~ore on the long road from the early Marx to late phenomenology '. history to form.dlstl. but they also erect counterfeit signposts toward causal explanatlo~s. Turner 1957) that sought t~ am~e at aggreg_ate descriptions of social structures by illuminating their cyclical dynamics. The first form was confined to analyses of repetitive processes of the short and medium term-analyses we would barely recognize as historical at all now. other than Leach (1954). senior sons typically inherited their
-1 ~
. seems to have said as much. was the second u~e of:he past. Similarlr' If HIghl~nd B.. migration. then.' if utterly undiachronic. and colomal"conquest ~s dls~I~led Into a two-dimensional. descriptive accounts / of exisnng SOCIal ystems. event to structure. Thus Barnes (1954:171) retraced 130 years of Ngoni history in order to show that "the form of [their] social structure [had] remained the same'~. we ~ad been doing history all along-and neither co~ld nor should do otherwise: when the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth finally blessed the rapprochement with our "sister discipline" at its annual conference (Lewis 1968). Any hisrorical anthropology that sustains a fi~ed dichotomy between the ideological and the objective is ~ound to ru? into a~ the ~l~ proble'."2°Less grand in scope. anthropology really was concerned with time (as if this were the same thing. for instance. blood-and-guts narratives of social struggles. was the historical study of social institutions. Recall the. 1980). If we could show. for example. with hindsight. we would argue. T~is is not to ~ay that there are no essences and realities in the world. Do not misunderstand us: Some of these studies especia~y those of the Manchester School in Central Africa.
ETHNOGR!\PHY. Evans-Pritchard ([1961] 1963:55) observed that s "a ter~ like 'structure' can only be meaningful when used as an historical expression to denote a set of relations known to have endured over a considerable period of time. we might be persuaded to s~y that they "have" an asymmetrical alliance system. mor~ fashionably addressed. Reminiscent of Levi-Strauss's (1963a) statistical models. More often than not. In sho~t.ls of brute empiricism-not to menUon accusatlo~s ?f ~nsensltlv. a distinction that itself is to be interrogated wherever It surfaces. . this kind of history may be suggestive.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
21
Western idea of universalism. . are misleading.med [the ." Echoes of Annale!.g. But the latter were r~moved from history. particularly when re~d a~ros. never to transform it. and Smith (1962) argued that. lined us up With art and a~srherics against science.
Most notable among them were studies of domestic groups (Fortes 1949' GO?dy 1958) and villag:s ~Mitchell 1956b. W~o d?es it empower and in what manner? Are there other forms of hlstoncal consciousness in the same contexts? Are thcy expressed or suppress~d? By what means? In sum. in rates and incidences. once again. ~owever. Judiciously and imaginatively used. but similar in object and spmr.matter. . Schapera (1962). among Marxists concerned with the reproduction of systems of domination (e.to Its own positioning and provisionality. lifeless aggregate ter. tealism" a figure of analytic speech used for rather different theoretical'ends by Brown and Lyman (1978: 5).

that all are inherently unstable and generically dynamic. Most communities. thereby separating culture from society and reducing it to the "outer dress" of social action. and that it is acted upon to ensure intelligibility 10 the face of fragmentary realities (see following discussion). . fragmentary character of social reality and the question of order. nonetheless. fell somewhere between. to vulgar idealism in order to rationalize the behavior of homo eamomicus in the Kachin Hills. Leach added. Consequently. in so-calledgumsa formations. social reality never "forms a coherent whole. also provides a useful critical lesson. for actor and analyst alike. statistical sraternenr." as we said.so because of the principle ofpnmogeOlture. Anything but statistical or inductive. rdfi' 23 form. For normal SOCiologythere may be enduring appeal in ignoring cultural ambiguity. abetted the process of structural change by pursuing their own ends (p. (4) failing to locate Highland Burmese communities in continental and global context or within linear processes of the long run." But. What is more. Many are familiar with his ethnographic case: In Highland Burma. the close and ambiguous kinship ties that often linked spouses before marriage were commonly (re)negotiated during their lives together (see Chapter ~). But the latter were not static: They were constantly moving in the direction of either the Shan or thegumlao "type.lt also resonated with Bakhtin's (1981:270) insistence that the holism of (lin~uisti~). Political Systems of Highland Burma certainly has its shortcomings.. is the mode of enchantment that. a study sometimes said to have anticipated by many years (1) the move 10 anthropology toward practice theory (~uller af. by nature. as has often been said. too.historic "anthropological societies. That IS not the object of our historical anthropology. for reasons having to do with the POhtlCSof affinity here. and (3) the recog. the other. Whether or not they are justified (see Fuller and Parry 1989:12-13). men made themselves into senior sons in the course of these processes (T. 10 our culture makes truth "empirica1. encouraging a countermovement-itself impelled by the selfinterested actions of individuals who. however. So be it. . most distressing of all. 5)-is perennial.y which . There are also three constructive lessons.
ETHNOGRAPHY. each stands as a general admonition. Indeed given that accounts of this kind come in a highly persuasive . finally. But that. two idealized representations of political order. term. They may manufacture misinforma tion... appealing to diverse values. egalitarian. it was the logic of practi~e. Leach has been taken to task for (1) relying on crass utilitarianism. is only part of the story.1~Parry 198~:I3). (2) the call to situate local systems in the Wider political and sOC1. ongoing. gumlao and Shan as ideal "types"-without subjecting them to historical analysis-and then treating them as factual realities. in ~educing ~essy "native:' categones . not given.to ~ea..a~ orlds of w which they are part (Ortner 1984:142). it is a necessary analytic fiction. ." to recall Cancian's (1976) extraordinary. fragmentary and inconsistent (p. autocratic Shan state. One was the highly centralized. representative of this position was Leach's temarkable Political Systems of Hwhland Burma (195~). and th~t." As they did so. something that any historical anthropology would want to avoid. not a set of ascriptive norms. these rnethods deflect our attention away from the problematic quality of habitual practices. we are told. and. Leach would have scorned any postmodern suggesJ
I •t
. . because it affords a means by which otherwise invisible connections between social phenomena may be traced out and explained. hierarchical. Kachin groups were caught up in a dynamic pattern of movement between two polar types.OltlOn that all human communities are shaped by an interplay between internal forms and external conditions (Leach 1954: 212). The net effect over the long run. (2) resorting. "System. rarely made good on-that societies are "processes in time. to be drawn from this worthy effort to give expression to the assertion-often made." It is. "democratic" gumlao polity. the decentralized. 8). (5) reducing history to a repetitive pattern of (bipolar) social equilibrium.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
23
fathers' property an~ positi~n. the rules of rank might have provided the r~etorical terms in which claims were argued. inevirable.
For Leach (1954:4). but they simply could not decide matters one way or the other. "every real society is a process in time": Inrernal change-either transformation within an existing order or the alteration of its structure (p.a society reveals itself as what it is. an "as if" model of the world. We are not concerned here with evaluating these criticisms.e.22
THEORY. 8).0ns. numerically based generalizatio~s about Tswana succession and marriage may do worse than tell us nothing. some 150 years. The third mode of historiography III contemporary British anthropology. By virtue of the manner in which succession struggles were culturally constructed. in sacrificing _polyphony to the quest for certainty. hiding their historicity by mystifying their mea~ingful construetion and the bases of their empowerment. was a pattern of oscillating equilibrium. L. to account for human motives. to which we find ourselves much closer in spirit. that there are no pre. (Bourdle~ 1977:19f). a universalist cliche. (3) describing gumsa. they have the capacity to render soft facts into ha ctl. "history is the movement b. i~ was based on the axiom that all social orders exist in time. that gave form to such struggl~s. But they did not nece~sa~~y do. But. or rather challenges. as Dumont (1957:21) once put it." therefore. surably "scientific" ones. contradictions) of that "type" would manifest themselves. hence they are to be added to our negative checklist. s~ste~s is posited. Likewise. Cornaroff 1978)." The first concerns the fluid." Perhaps most. the internal inconsistencies (i. is always a fiction. As this implies.

Leach falls back on a classical.27 never quite laying down their ghosts once and for all. because the world is experienced as ambiguous and incoherent. the shift to the plural. So do some notable attempts to resituate them within World History (e. a truly historical anthropology is only possible to the extent that it is capable of illuminating the endogenous historicity of all social worlds. Sahlins 1981). historical writing. internally dynamic-if in their own particular ways-all along. They can neither be presumed nor posited by negative induction.g. Of course. while sustaining ahistorical models of nonEuropean "social formations"-whether these be described in the language of Levi-Strauss. it came increasingly to rest. without some way. thence to arrange them into expository narratives. Structuralism has long obsessed over the individual and the event.g. and the memoir. he is not alone in finding it hard to escape the liberal modernism of his own European culture. in itself. stressing rather the (a priori) mechanics of their reproduction. Models of noncapitalist orders abound. or Max Weber. Sahlins's structuralism. Here. The last lesson to be taken from Political Systems of Highland Burma) and from the arguments that followed in its wake. Note that the master motif of the Kachin past. This is not to denigrate the insights that have come from looking anew at worlds other than our own through the eyes of. biography-the optic that fuses individual and event into both a worldview and a narrative genre-lies at the methodological COreof much ethnography and his tory. has to do with "units of analysis": the terms. . to cite Meillassoux's (1972:10 I) startling revision of genesis. that is. is no bad thing. For. Meillassoux's Marxism. then. case studies. This may seem old hat. Indeed. the recognition of differences-anthropology will continue to cast "other cultures" in the timeless shadows of its own dominant narratives. as we said earlier. set out to disinter the dynamic structure underlying a diverse (dis?)array of social arrangements and representations. incoherence and disorder. to show that. society is formless. because we do not see its invisible forms. as he tells it. of grasping those historicities-note.. that. albeit often unobserved. again. is a preemptive counterchallenge to the deconstructive impulse of the 1990s: Absence and disconnection. and classically ethnocentric. It wiJl also leave intact the disabling opposition between historiography and ethnography. Good intentions notwithstanding.g. have actually to be demonstrated. which find their way into much. that. feminist anthropology (see. Leach's analysis raises the difficult question of whether historical anthropology is forever compelled to share the two fundamental tropes of Western historiography. not that they were inherently. it is impossible to' restore history to peoples allegedly without it by appealing to historical models of global processes. "cold" cultures? Of local worlds trapped in repetitive cycles of structural time (Gluckman 1965:285f)-until.. how much have we really advanced on our old conception of "trad itional" societies. that nothing lies behind its broken. But we have not ended up with any generally accepted theories or models of the historicity of non-Western societies.. The very idea would probably have struck him as a lamentable failure of the analytic imagination. Collier and Yanagisako 1987) or. because social life seems episodic and inconsistent. Wolf 1982).
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
25
tion that. was oscillating equilibrium. Coquery-Vidrovitch (1976:91) said fifteen years ago that "no one doubts any longer that precolonial societies had a history. values and events. by which social science breathes life into data. on an empirical scaffolding of life histories. Biography is anything but innocent.AIts most articulate textual vehicles in our own sociery are the private diary. the individual and the event. conception of social history. say. the implication is clear. Marx. manufacturers.. it must therefore lack all systematicity. Bluntly put. e. it is one thing to recognize the undeniable. in particular." Still.
.w Perhaps that.
ETHNOGRAPHY. most of which merely show that they have been enmeshed in global connections for longer than previously thought. Terminological niceties aside. whatever the merits of Leach's account. multifaceted surfaces. military men. yet few demonstrate their internal capacity for transformation (cf. another to give account of it. the journal. Again. for that matter. and Bourdieu's embodied practice. if our models are supple enough. e. and the like. often methodologically naive. Political Systems of Highland Burma) remember. in the ethnographer's notebook it typi-
. The situation of structural functionalism is similar: For all its ostensible concern with the nomothetic. usually due to contacts with foreign formations"? Even recent efforts to reconceptualize "precapitalist systems" (see. But there is danger here. especially processes in Western political economy. it can have no regularity. In offering his methodological individualist account of structural drift. they should make sense of even the most chaotic and shifting social environment. And yet.24
THEORY. or ministers of state. to the currently fashionable concern with the encounter between international and parochial systems. missionaries. however provisional. We require good grounds for claiming the nonexistence of a system cr a strucrure-e-the foN that we are unable to-discern one at first blush is hardly proof that it is not there. as has been said ad nauseam) "peripheral" populations do not acquire history only when they are impelled along its paths by the machinations of merchants. Wolf's world system. they suffer "historical accidents. The second lesson of Political Systems of Highland Burma2s applies to the historical anthropology of the modern world order. a great epochal movement realized in a cumulative series of incidents animated by (universal) human motives and (rational) modes of action. Guy 1987) treat them as
resolutely prehistorical. We halle learned much from them. social dramas of interpersonal conflict. universal and local cultures.

in the eighteenth century. At this point a shift in voice is appropriate. and indeterminate in their value and meaning." It is this fantasy that lea~s ~ist. will be woven into more or less tightly integrated. then. the individual and the even~ have everywhere to be treated as problematic.'syst~mat~c conquest of the universe. Quite the contrary: Culture always contains within it polyvalent." Bourdieu (19. a sing. it serves to per~etuate the "biographical illusion": to regard persons and performances I? the . culturally specific. yet others may become more or less unfixed. Having set the scene for our historical anthropology in a critical key. consensual signs and contested images? Precisely how are meaningful atoms of human action and interaction contrived? The lessons we draw from Political Systems of Highland Burma-and. signifiers at once material and symbolic.o~ians to seek social causes ~n individual action and social action tn individual causes. The former 1~ strongly associated with the rise.26
THEORY. more generally. by recent developments in cultural studies and "cultural poetics" (Greenblatt 1990:3)." an image of a self-conscious being freed from the webs of enchantment and possessed of the capacity to gaze out at. Neither pure langue nor pure parole.history. Barker (1984). of biography as history personified. as we stressed earlier. images. in any case. Gusdorf (1980. Yet the diary. we wish to allow the essays to speak for themselves. ". life-histones bespeak a notion of the human career as an ordered progression of acts and events. Clearly. involved in tracking the movement of societies and peoples through time.ular dialogic contrivance of observer and subject. Indeed.87) calls rt. . patently ideological modes of lnscnptlon. potentially contestable messages. the Iife story IS an instrument of bourgeois history-in-the-making. consequently. among others. Still the anthropological keyword par excellence.otentlally. It is.
ETHNOGRAPHY.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
27
cally appears in the guise of the life .autonomo~s "agents. "private" motives and collective consciousness. they pose three challenges to any historical anthropology: (1) to address the equations of structure and indeterminacy. of form and incoherence. we offer the briefest synopsis. we take culture to be the semantic space. For reasons detailed elsewhere (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991 :13f). or renders mdetermmate. Nor is it a passi:e.m th. as the narrative spotlight narrows ever more sharply on actors and their scripts. argues that it "has been.
.moderm~t fan~asy about society and selthood according to which everyone 1S. relatively explicit worldviews.asur~. historically unfolding ensemble of signifiers-in-action. noting that autobiography IS peculiar to the ~estern sensibility of selfhood. As a medium of (self-) representation. relatively freefloating.Promethean mode. at any moment in time. they CO~stltuted. made into subjects. If historical anthropology is to avoid recapitulating the eccentncltles and ethnocentricities of the West. more generally. Just how are. Here. at this pornt. the bounded individual is even a salient unit of subjectivity? What is it in any social context that constructs utilities and rationalities.. It is a shor~ step fro. . Imp~rtlal mstrurnent.ctl~e narrat!ves of epochs and civilizations. as . (2) to disinter the endogenous historicity of local worlds. JS that for the most part social science persists in treating biography as a neutral. -. we should say something of its positive conceptual foundations. of good use m the systematic conquest of the universe. one strand i~ the pro~ess whereby private thoughts and deeds are woven into t~e colle.sald to have laid down the terms in which they may be represented-and. It is not merely an abstract order of signs.
. We began to lay these out in Of Revelation and Revolution (1991). Inasmuch as it records such actions and events. Fabian 1983). of bourgeois pers~nhood. to find the motors of the pa~t and present in rational individualism. the field of signs and practices.!"e well know. traces its roots back to the Cartesian "I. or relations among signs. p. and hence their societies and histories. . entirely coherent system. both perceptual and practical. and (3) to rupture the basic tropes of Western historiography-biography and eventby situating being and action. if anything it is enhanced.gregated. ". not threatened. transparent window into history. we are . and me. of the "biographical illusion. in short. in order to understand better their place within the world historical processes of which they are part." Anthr~pologlsts. within their diverse cultural contexts. are alleged accessories in all this: By translatmg. dominant worldviews and polyvalent symbols. Gusdorf mayor may not be correct about the '.29). and actions. the
actions of human beings in the world? What decides whether. th~ world. in the first place. a historically situated. the experience of o~hers into our own measures of being-in-time (cf. Nor is it just the sum of habitual practices. Some of these. in which human beings construct and represent themselves and others. from the early rapprochement of history and anthropology-converge in these questions. text-a sad proxy for life-becomes all. history as ~iography ag. considered in light of our dialogue with l'histoire des mentalids. to find order in events by putting events in order. a. it never constitutes a dosed. And context dissolves away into so many shadows. the actions of . the place to begin is with the idea of culture itself. culturally and historically? What determines. and to pay little heed to the social and cultural for~s that silently shape and constrain human action. In so doing. the stuff of counterideologies and "subcultures"." Our more immediate worry. in both senses of the word. in control of his or her destiny in a world made by.th~ life history are. and . comparatively. others may be heavily contested.lSto a vision of History and Society as the dramaturgy of intersecting lives: a theater in which. social and aesthetic.

are not normally the
subject of explication or argument (cf. . Hegemony. ideology is more likely to be perceived as a matter of inimical opinion and interest and hence is more open to contestation. although the degree of its preeminence may vary a good deal. then. But it also immerses itself in the. often sparked by contradictions that a prevailing culture no longer hides. always lia~le to cha~lenge by.~ Power. the logic of prevailing cultural forms. does not appear to be ideological at all. both symbolic and material-control that. others not. for collective symbolic production. This is why its power seems to be independent of human agency. however. on the one hand. And. Indeed. also. but it is directly implicated in their constitution and determination. It follows that it is seldom contested openly. the commonplace comes to be questioned-is always a historically specific issue. internalized-~n th~ir negative guise. and consump~i~n of ~lg~S and o~Jects. Sometimes It appears as the (relative) abilit~ of human beings to shape the lives of o~hers by. so.T
28
TH EOR Y. medical knowledge and material production. underlies the differences.to be added into the equation. But other. subordinate populations also have ideologies. The manner in which a sectarian world view actually comes to naturalize structures of inequality-or..
. albeit with a cautionary amendment: Power is Itself not above. is the basic difference between hegemony and ideology. ideology describes "an articulated system of meanings. We take hegemony to refer to that order of signs and material practices. As this implies. to gain some control over the terms in which the world is ordered. Carried in everyday practice and self-conscious texts." we. Hegemony. drawn from a specific cultural field. as Foucault understood. and beliefs of a kind that can be abstracted as [the] 'worldview'" of any social grouping (Williams 1977:109). values. H [STORIOGRA
PHY
Erhnography and the Historical Imaginarion
29
!:
It has been widely argued in recent years that the concept of culture. ideology invites argument. they do. has. . conversely. others disputed:even when they are backed by the technology of terror. forms that direct human perceptions and practices along conventional pathways. as an orderly worldvie:. exerting co~1trol over the production. insofar as they try to assert themselves. Hegemony consists of constructs and conventional practices that have come to permeate a political community. universal. This kind of nonagentipe power saturates such things as aesthetics and ethics. as conventions. a master narrative. life. become salient. it involves the assertion of control over various modes of production. "Power. in their neutral gUise. the terrible twins of much recent social theory. it constantly has to be made and. Obviously. if carefully deployed. at once. in itself.and. being axiomatic. the regnant ideology of any period or place will be that of the dominant group. At the same time. It consists of things that go without saying: things that. is that part of a dominant ideology that has been naturalized and. repertoire of polyvalent images and practices. by the same token. that ~ome . and true shape of SOCialbeing-salthough its infusion into local worlds. nor outside of. may be unmade. Let us elaborate. since it determines why some signs are dominant. over the making of both subjectivities and realities. to lie in what it silences. Typically. This distinction between modalities of power and agency. devalued use of these terms. in spontaneous images and popular styles. Although we regret the often unspecific. ideology originates in the assertions of a particular social group. even chaotic. this worldview may be more or less internally systematic. therefore. as long as it exists. on the ot~er." such f~rms seem to be beyond human agency. then. is where hegemony and ideology. They also serve to refrarne the idea of cult~re itself in such a way as t~ embrace. culture and history. its systemic and indeterminate features: the fact that it appears. is incapable of grasping the meaningful bases of economy and society. as a heterodox. circulation. is mute. built form and bodily representation. no hegemony is ever total (Williams 1977:109). And its effects are. It cannot. and material forms comes to be explicitly negotiable. be "added" to them in such a way as to solve the great conundrums of history and society. to invoke Marx and Engels (1970). m their positive guise. meanings. This is power in the agentipe mode. of inhabited history and imagined worlds. is never automatic. its hegemony is threatened.are told. that they become so habituated as no longer to be noticed. For it is only through repetition that things cease to be perceived or remarked. notwithstanding the fact that the interests they ser~e may be all too human. at that moment it becomes the subject of ideology or counterideology. then. E THNOG
RAP H Y. what it puts beyond the limits of the thinkable. This. Conversely. they too will call actively upon them-even if only to clash their symbols. of _power and culture. offe~ a cogent way of speaking about the force of meaning and the meaning of force-the inseparability. will the extent to which it is empowered by the instrumental force of the state. more or less consistent in its outward forms.to be taken for granted as the natural. why some practices seem to be consensual. and the relationship. it provides an organizing scheme. 167). forms of everyday. we would argue. as constraints. we suggest. The g~n~ral point is well taken. the moment that any set of values. a process to
I
. between ideology and hegemony-which may fruitfully be regarded as the two empowered dimensions of any culture. Here. Bourdieu 1977:94. must be sustained in such a way as to become invisible. the ideologies of the subordinate may express hitherto voiceless experience. Still. as values. is an intrinsic quality of the ~ocial and the cultural: 1n short their determining capacity. having contrived a tangible world in its image. That is why it has been described as a process rather than a thing. that ~s. however. Hegemony is beyond direct argument. Being "natural" and "ineffable. at its most effective.

social and symbolic-appear .. This. where. the less successful. without a generic theory of society and culture-or find enclav~s.he connective t~ssues-the processes and pathways of face-to-face sodalities-e-seern to dissolve into thin air. of course. however. authoritative. brings us back to the question of method. any culture does present itself as relatively coherent. the more of its ideology will disappear into the domain of hegemonic practice. Its forms-which are indivisibly semantic and material. In Of Repelation and Revolution we take this analytic scheme further. simultaneously ordered and disorderly. for us still ~hlck':1th meaning. paradoxically. But the conclusion is clear: With a sufficiently supple view of culture. The premise of unification. all-too-easy means of bounding analytic fields. we have felt ill equipped to broach. IS essential to ~ollect. all neatly circumscribed phenomena. But this requires that we treat culture as a shifting semantic field. sometimes they erupt in parody. And this. In their own e~hnographic right. and the politics and culture of colonialism. "high" culture. Sometimes these are implicated in open power struggles. is illusory.ce to capitalism. we insist. using it to explore consciousness and representation. Yet.
ETHNOGRAPHY.
~?
1 -. This shift.Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
30
THEORY. a partially integrated mosaic of narratives. To do so is to be misled. of ~ome hn:ltauon [Q th~ "c~aos of variety" (Holquist in Bakhtin 1981:xix). The world is everywhere dualistic-this being one of those realities for which we ought to have respect. the more its unspoken conventions will be opened to contest. highly systemic yet unpredictable. global and local social orders. .
. styles that do not conform. has practical consequences. self-evidently. The paradox.e.of netw~rks ~nd symbolic interaction-to a methodological individualism. O:. far from being reducible to a closed system of signs and relations. images. sometimes they express themselves in mundane activity of indeterminate intention and consequence. a field of symbolic production and material practice empowered in complex ways. however long that turns out to be. for ritual and re~lstan.s that concentrate and fix them. hen~e. forcing us to enter rarified realms of floating texts and macrostructures. We looked for s~bcultures. is most likely to occur when the gap berween the world-as-represented and the world-as-experienced becomes both palpable and insupportable. the discourses of science. me. historical agency and social practice. domination and resistance. among them the metro-
poles. authoritative yet arguable. they do seem eternal and universal-at least for the continuing present. After all. all social fields are swept hy contrary waves of unity and diversity: by forces that diffuse power and meaning and by counte.within the alien~ting world of modernity. our str~tegy for studying "complex" situations was either to turn to the ~oc~o~ogy.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
31
which all ruling regimes have to pay heed. We are not alone in urging that anthropology shift its concentration away from ~impl: structures and local systems.eumqueness and ambiguity? To repeat: for us the answer lies In a historical anthropology that is dedicated to explorin the. it must be founded on a conception of culture and society that takes us beyond our traditional stamping grounds-one that travels easily to a newer generation of field sites. whatever forms are powered by the force of habit are naturalized and uncontested. In its hegemonic dimensions. or the semantics of commodities.
IV
How. and marginal minorities. to be at the same time (and certainly over time) coherent yet chaotic. But alongside them there are always countervailing forces: dialects that diverge. Note that we say eperywhere. we are asked to make a choice. they are systems nonetheless.these have been regarded as forces eroding traditional orders or as significant causes o~ our modern difficulties" (McCracken 1988:xi). that IS. The more successful any regime. t. consensual. each of which emphasizes one side of the dualism. consensual yet internally consradictory. redeeming them Without losl~g ~helr ~ragll.29 And so we ~a~e remained largely in the countryside. frag~ents of human worlds. Situating our fragments is thus a challenging task. of our conventiona. alternative moralities and world-maps. In the great confrontation between modernist and postmodern perspectives on [he world. processes that make and transform particular worlds-processes tha~ re~lprocally shape subjects and contexts.l. In sum. do we do an ethnography of the historical imagination? How d~ we con~extuali~e the. In the past. that allow certain things to be S~l~ and don. for the systems [Q which we relate them are systems of a complex sort. at least as traditionally defi~ed. systemic. to the very idea of society and c~ltur:. But so IS the inevitability of proliferation. Here we seek to make a more general point: that it is possible for anthropology to live easily with the concept of culture and to defend it cogently against its critics. If a neomodern anthropology is to work creatively at the frontiers of ethnography and the historical imagination. then.lve ~Ife-:-:and. polyphony. and plurality. however. on ethnic islands and culturally distinct archipelagoes. At ~e~t. Informal economies.er time. and mass media of Europe and America. we may begin to understand why social life everywhere appears dualistic. and signifying practices.ntalities. finally. We should not deny them coherence merely because they refuse to reduce readily to simple structures. Above all. such things as electronic media. it deprives us. Until very recently. the meaningful world is always fluid and ambiguous. Whatever.rf~rce.

True. The Naparama and th~ir kind re~al. As a mode of observation. however.elos of SOCial phenomena. . even in drawings and children's games. world-transforming processes (cf Cohn 1987. for that reason. as well as the wealth of reported speech about them. we should approach it from the same perspective: as meaningful practice. each endowed with its own historicity. the humble agents of a global movement. Eve~ macrohistorical processes-the building of states. But. Nor ought we to confine ourselves to history's out~tatlons. and this has determined our. That assumption appears true only as poss . colonial evangelism must be understood both as a cultural project in itself and as the metonym of a global movement. P?int of entry ~n~oany c~ltural field. Whether our . The latter. 1TI a Pf1?fl comrasts-between stasis and change.' and are separable for heuristic purposes from anyr~I~~ beyo?d their immediate environs." from the unruly. fragments into exemplary texts without adequately relating them to the Wider worlds
00
that produce them.soCiety and history. and so on-that assume the meani. Man~ of . and here that we return to our opening theme. less pejorative terms. tracts. the point of entry was obvious enough: We began with the conventional chronicles of the Nonconformist missions. sa~. in short. Being rooted in the meaningful practices of people great and small. to confront global issues in more inventive. Elsewhere (1991:35ff) we have discussed the general problem of recovering the histories of peoples like the Tswana from evangelical and official records. Clearly. who would come to be known as "the" Tswana. But the African past would become subservient to the European present. inhabited a world with its own history. Indeed. We are still. surely. the making of revolutions." "regionalism" and "nationalism. a context in which anthropologists might recognize their kinship with cultural historians and embark on an ethnography of the archives. traces found in newspapers and official publications as well as in novels." Rather. It is precisely here that anthropology has shown a failure of Imagmatlon. Ethnography does not have to respect a binary worl~-ma~. . a topic now receiving long overdue attention (Amin 1984. or a discernible perspective. And this Impedes us as we. The phenome~a . of the contingent and ~he cont. problems unprecedented in earher studies of." take on their meamng. even unnatural worlds 0 mo erruty or "capitalism. we soon learned not to rely on any preconstituted "documentary record. domestic production. Guha 1983). then. they are. produced in the interplay of subject and object. not Promethean heroes or universal soldiers. .. Here we are more specifically concerned with the question of how to do a historical anthropology of dominant. Several of the essays that follow address the anthropology of empire. grafting them onto universalist theories of . Nor.us cominue to be hampered.tween tra~itio~ and modernity. we had first to characterize each party as a complex collectivity. a history of great political communities built and broken. voodoo exorcism in the Caribbean or voodoo economics on Capitol Hill. in trying to make sense of the churchmen's various writings.it is not easy to forge units of .' It ne~d not be tied either to face-to-face scenes or to a specific sort of SOCIal ubject. ETHNOGRAP
HY. Instead of a clear-cut chain of events. try to dissolve the great analytic divide be.we op~erve may be grou~ded lTI everyday human activity.' nation-state of empire or of a diaspora presents an et hnograp h Y of the . we had to pursue what Greenblatt (1990: 14) terms the "textual traces" of the period.r
32
TH EOR Y.. its participants certainly saw themselves as an integral part of the grand imperial design. suitable cases for anthropological treatment. s we have classically set our sights on particular pers~ns and palpable processes. This. is always involved in the making of wider structures and ~oCialmovements. .' b unded social fields. unbounded. But we are not. whether or not we choose to write about them directly. prompted to de~l. The methodological implications of all this are best explored by way of a specific instance.n prImitive rebels. The former were footsoldiers of colonialism. let alone the axes of typological difference.
HISTOR
IOGRA
PHY
1
!
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
33
We are the first [0 acknowledge that . theodl~y and theory.' ." But few.extu~l. limited to the wntmg of mlCroS?ciologies or histories. popular songs. yet such activity. But It would be false to assume that ana IYSls10 un 0 . In order to grasp this process. . In our own work. For it is in the gradual articulation of such alien worlds that local and universal realities come to define each other-and that markers like "ethnicity" and "culture. is the problem resolved by . ession rites or lineage relations.nr loom rhan our focus. or by literary critical methods that ~ake ethnographic. 1 . Davis 1990:32). as long as we sustain the pnmlttvl~t fict1~n that ditional orders are natural and self-perpetuating-and radically different tra If" d . Cooper and Stoler 1989). And then we had to retrace the (often barely visible) minutiae of their interactions. as we suggested.' .upgra?ing me~hanical m.. is an appropriate site for an imaginative sociology. in conceiving open systems.ng a?d. even when rura~ or peripheral. in particular the nineteenth-century encounter between British Nonconformist missionaries and peoples of the South African interior. ible i t such "local" phenomena are VISI e 10 t h e roun d I ong as we pre tend tha . made into the timeless sign of the "traditional" periphery. the
extension of global capitalism-have their feet on the ground. they must always be present in our accounts (cf.
. the colonial archives revealed a set of arguments. gifts and commodities.odels of local systems. t.topic be headhunting 1TI the Amazon or headshrinking in America (or is it vice versai}. would wish to condemn anthropology to such pastoral archaism. what should define us is a unique anal~IC s~ance. by the ~uahs~ o~ an enduring evolutionism. They were dialogic in
"
.

ETHNOGRAPHY. at root. By excavating the career of a particular document it is possible to follow the edit~r's pen as it refigured authorial statements. we had to address the matter by locating a flood of rapportage from the imperial frontier in the complex textual field wrought by the industrial revolutio~.omestic detail and small-scale civilities as by assertive political and economic means. T~e writings of th~ South African evangelists are especially interesting t~ls ~e?ard.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
35
Bakhtin's (1981:272f) sense. For only then can we situate indivi~ual expressions and signifying practices w. therefore. and self-doubts aired in letters to kin were not expos_edto morally vigilant mission overseers. it was one fractured by internal difference-and by diverging images of empir~ lock~d in "socio-ideological" struggle (p. Cohn 1987:49).ed to the ~ission societies. correspondence was political property. the consequences of so-called print capitalism (Anders~m 198.erelayers of texts produced-indeed. In the case of colonial evangelism. going perhaps beyond Bakhtin.:. be reduced to one another. though. of how the autonomous creative urge runs up against cultural constraint. with their strong taste for Christian heroics. In order to reconstruct the annals of a cultural imagination. for example. But this is just a specific instance of the general problem of reading SO~la1 process~s from exemplary representations. by which coherence was distilled out of the often chaotic. agency. Such are the tools that build hegemonies. And pamphlets became books eyewitness epics of "labors and scenes" beyond the frontiers of civilization: Thus ". scattered shards from which we presume worlds. evangelism. anthropology has never been content to equate meaning merely with explicit consciousness. agonies. since it brings a nuanced understanding of the role of meaning and motivation to social processes. But our methods should tell us something of the way in which personal acts become social facts. they cannot. included the Christian overseas mission. were forged the precepts and projects of a new hegemony. It was only by reconstructing rhis field of argument-and. Bakhtin 1981:272f). the relationship of individual experience to the collective. then. both with and beyond the guardians of memory in the societies we study (Cohn 1987:47f). in the orbits of connection and influence that give them life and force. 273). that a historical ethnography must always go beyond literary traces. amidst all the contradictions of the age. often unconscious logic of sociocultural categories and
ill
. Again. For the poetics of history lie also in mute meanings transacted through goods and practices. It cannot content itself with established canons of documentar-y evidence because these are themselves part of the culture of global modernism~as much the subject as the means of inquiry. locating our fragments requires a sense of the way In which they ride the crosscurrents of division and unity at any moment.ithin a wider field of r:prese~tatIon. of M~ica a~d Europe. A historical ethnography. that is. even divisive. must begin by constructing its own archive. episodic stream of missionary experience (cf. so Corrigan and Sayer (1985) hold that the making of the modern British state was a cultural revolution borne in large measure by the humdrum rituals and routines that shaped the lives of subjects. and the way to rule and save savages. exegesis. by redeeming i~s politics-rhat we began to understand the cultural revolution entailed 10 both the rise of European capitalism and the imperial gesture. Letters became pamphlets. by that token. that work thoroughgoing social transformations behind the back of a declarative heroic history. who w_eremore responsive to evocative accounts of savagery. the great empires of the past established themselves as much in a welter of d. discourses were fused into a consistent ideology.3). The latter expressed itself In disputes about such things as abolition. an entire stratigraphy. beyond explicit narrative. We would insist. although persons and collectivities "somehow determine" each other. But. And so an ethnography of this archive begins to disinter the processes by which disparate. of cultural and historical hereroglossia that gave voice to complex patterns of social stratification. Just as the Reverend John Philip saw that any effort to re-form "the" Tswana supposed "[bringing about] a revolution in their habits" (see Chapter 10). of course. and work. through icons and images dispersed in the landscape of the everyday (Cornaroff and Comaroff 1987. rationalizing them into publishable forms that framed the doctrine of humane imperialism. this is as true of world historical movements as it is of the most local processes. a new bourgeois modernism with universalist horizons and global ambitions. The. After all. nor to the churchgoing masses. These. Not only was similar material carefully contrived for diverse audiences revealing the range of purposes and consrraints at work in the civilizing quest. Once address. wildness and civilization. it involved a contest over both the shape and meaning of "natural facts" and the major constituents of modern knowledge: its constructs of person. even argument. but also of the role of inscriptions of various kinds in the making of ideology and argument. If the colonizers formed a single block. they partook of diverse genres. Certainly. they have to be anchored in the processes of their production. moreover we have to operate with a working theory not merely of the social world. nor to philanthropists. Here.34
THEORY. Sahlins (1990:47) notes that. As anthropologists. but the historical role of these writings varied likewise. we must work both in and outside the official record. ' This implicit dimension-the study of symbolic practice-is a crucial contribution of ethnography to history. to be liberally edited and recycled for campaigns in parliament and the public domain. In fact.y differed a good deal in their intent and formality: The ambiguities. If texts are to be more than literary toper.
. At its best.

n?r . it !~volved" ~n od~ssey.. their tools and tropes also carried the imprint of the IOdu~tnal m~rketplace and its commodity culture. p. where the relationship between the two dirnensions of colonial evangehsm-itself a highly specific encounter of the :'local" and the "global"-:-took on its real complexity. . And the general methodological point? There are several. of evangelical imperialism were to be fixed by the ~lder context 10 which It was embedded.h~me. ThIS IS.of proletarianization. it cornmanded us to pursue the colonizing gesture beyond audible ideologies and visible institutions into the realm of such unspoken forms as bodies. Although they WIshed to recreate. to the contrary. systems of meaning have determinations of their own. in which purposive. social history.at our current conceptual obsession with agency. this narrative told of the reconstruction of a living culture by the infusion of alien signs and commodities into every domain of Tswana life. For the
l
J
I
were themselves cont~adictory products of a contradictory world.d. a paradox that ran to the heart of the colonial encounter. in turn. that our methodological concern is less WIth even. where it was possible to disinter. along with other COlo01z~ng forc~s. The first is th. ~~ have argued elsewhere (n. Its salience becomes particularly visible when we examine epochal movements like European colonialism. They do not just bend to the will of those who wish to know and act upon them. because it is always a product of complex experience
bourgeois
church~en
l
I
. third. they playa significant part in shaping subjectivity. Second. from the sediments of a dead community. perhaps. its practice proclaimed something else. then. which has led t~ calls for :l greater concern with agency. from our perspective. The "motivation" of social practice. It also prompted a cultural archaeology of the sites of earlier evangelical activity: for example. At times..ts ~han . But they mus~ do . Witness. subjectivity. however open ended. a highly purposive journey aimed at converting savages into pIOUSpeasants and citizens of Christendom. empowered in complex ways. these two levels reinforced one another at times they produced n. if related. just as they were to be mediated by the responses of the Tswana themselves (see Part 3). At another it parti~i~ated in seeding a pervasive new order that would. Although they were eminently effective in transforming local lives. the Imph~atlons.36
THEORY. and thereby rescued from vapl~ theoretICIS~. Like most ant~ropologlS. Yet. In many respects. as we have stressed will always be both predictable yet subject to the innovative and the unforeseen I:Ience our hist~rical et~nog~aphies must be capable of capturing th~ Simultaneous UOlty and diversity of social processes.[b)). an initiative moved by contradictory forces whose consequences differed radically from the stated motives of those involved. and merchandise. Here. always exists at two distinct.It follows from all this. the likes of which they had ~ecned back. silent and unseen. At one level. even a driving impulse. that it was in the space between the liberal world view of the mission and the racist world of settler society that modern black national~st c~ns~iousness was to take root. namely. that impulse is not enough to account for the determination of the processes involvedor even to tell very much of the story. Methodologically. the pulse of collective forces that.
I
. 25). the incessant convergence and div~rgence o~ pre_vailingforms of power and meaning. in implanting an orthodox Protestant peasantry on African soil. but its significance has been underlined by the humanist turn in social science. This distinction informs the analysis of all historical processes. in other words. remains one o~ the ~~I~Clple distinctions be~ween historical anthropology and social history. second. the windswept ruins of Tiger Kloof a mission school built for Southern Tswana early this century.wltho~t falling into the trap of typifying history in generalor histories 10 particular-s-as an expression of the radical contrast between modern (or postrnodern) worlds and their "traditional" antecedents. these actually ran counter to their own desires and motives. magic.:it~ m~aningful practiceS-which. and. buildings. Motivated.soClal ~orces to the SUm of unique acts (above. the evangelists failed ptecisely where they most hoped to succeed. 10 fact. can• be said to make a difference. We may have come to distrust formal. the British ~eoma~ry of yore. and consClousnes~can be a~d~essed only in ethnographic terms. the (culturally configured) needs and desires of human beings. lists. subordinated subjects of empire. While the mission spoke of itself and its intentions in the language of Christian conversion. levels: first. make Africans into impoverished. we are more preoccupied with ambiguous processes than with contained acts or isolable incidents that in themselves. 30 For. once again. in Africa. And their actions played a maJor role 10 process~s . the imperial mission.l[i~h 4isjuncti0L_13 and discontinuities. un~er a pair of conditions: that (1) we treat as problematic the manner 10 which persons are formed and action determined and (2) we ins~st that individual action is never entirely reducible to social forces. aspects of colonial pedagogy invisible in the written accounts. by the very situation of the evangelists in the European scheme of things. but we ought not to jettison the subtle semantic models that so enhance our sensitivity to the power of signs in the world.
ETHNOGRAPHY. illustrations. Or between commmoditized societies and natural economies. overly coherent notions of culture. To us 1 social life is continuous •• • actiVIty-aCtivity that.ightm. "heroic" action was a central motif.so .
HISTORIOGRAPHY
1
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
37
designs has long been our stock-in-trade.ts. and photographs-albeit now less for what they declared than for what they disclosed as maps of the mundane. In the longer run. was a paradox of motivation. because It IS multiply motivated. work through them. took us back to our archives-to letters. The scattered signs retrieved in this quest all pointed to wider social transformations borne unwittingly by the missionaries. as this sugge:ts. And this.

Yet. But they did not make the difference. history involves a sedimentation of micropractices into macroprocesses. While the bod~ has long been an important construct in Western social thought . they are accessible to historical ethnography. From this perspective.mcal postmodernism has challenged fixed notions of power and :eanmg. did they occasion moments of great rupture ' cataclysms that led to th e reconstruc. some would even say fetishism. They were. ~Ionof otherwise unchan~ing social syst~ms. rapidly transforming political arena. Colonial history does not lack for heroes or events. and modes o~ healing. In the "newer social history.ommodity production and turned out to have enormousl complex sO~lalconsequences. each WIth Its own indeterminacies and internal contradictions. For that reason. to an event. Perhaps becau~e cr. if not entirely. although the impact of the Actthe changing nature of property. to cite Davis (1990. Samuel's plea for the significance of the Married Women's Property Act over the Battle of Trafalgar in shaping nineteenthcentury Britain. by the predicament of these peoples in a fraught. it has recently gained exrraordm~~y prominence in the discourse of the human sciences. Some acts do have more consequence than others and. The plough for instance .(Durkhem~ 1947:II5-Il6. !he incorporation of "the" Tswana into the colonial world. its history remains rich with agency. representation.
ETHNOGRAPHY.lsewhere. multileveled engagement between worlds. Ized. more accurately. except in the most banal sense. This entails a move.. seemed an lllnocent . implicit in practice. a prosaic rather than a portentous affair in which events mark rather than make the flow of existence (cf.ces~ involving two dynamic social systems. significant ICons of-and elements tn-an unfolding. It also democratizes human agency by shifting attention from the subjectivity of big men to the force of communal projects and cultural practices. and resistance. it is not reducible. in everyday struggles over such things as agricultural tec~nique. and marriage-calls for a processual perspective. This is not to deny the importance of extraordinary human agency. some of it even "heroic. actors can become metonyms of history or. the use of land and wat~r.humble acts within the terrain they came to sharealthough their behavior also moved ' increasingly and in ways b are 1y rea1 . giving rise to the double context-the global stage and the local mise en scene-in which all "Third World" ethnographies would later be done. in certain contexts. womanhood. The pulse of these processes may be. In Africa.its analytic use and abuse-provid~s a nice comment~ry ~~ the lllt:rpreuve methodology of which we speak. dlscerned~ as we show in Chapter 9. Clearly. But it is this metonymy. Insofar a~global syst:~s and epochal movements always root themselves somewhere tn.ideals and ~r~ams especially compelling to those at the margins of the nsrng b?urge<:. rather.. especially by Foucault
1 •!
. events serve less as motors of change than to exemplify the mingling of the prescribed and the contingent=' and/or to reveal the effect of cultural form upon social processes. just as it personifies ambiguously authored action. that we have to explain. Sahlins 1990:39. Cohn 1987:45). Mauss 1973).28) again. Similarly.' enoug Instrument. ascribe to more dispersed causes? Heroes are born not of gods. it is. the quotidian. Nor. as.hlstoncal orders. Their charisma camouflages complex conditions of possibility. t~o . we would suggest the human bod mor: preclse~y. language and speech." says Davis (1990:28). e.:ard it). and practices. of heroic-history-in-themaking (Sahlins 1985:35f).. too. The players in this theater of the 0r d'mary c h ange d one another by ~eans of . however. . that we take meaning to be largely." Much the same may be said of rhe revolution that occurred when the forces of European imperialism sought to insinuate themselves into the non-European world. This approach does not so much "nullify" the event-as did an earlier structuralist history (cJ. And their reception by the often bemused Africans was determ~ned. There were many notable episodes: eprc ?rst r:neettngs. to embody and motivate processes whose origins we.lsle. something n which we can always lay hands. these made a difference. It is not that the historical encounter betwee~ th~ evan~ehs~s and the ~ricans was un-event-ful. in their own worlds. but of social forces. we do not see it to reside in abstract schemes or in categories that endure or change in aU-or-none fashion. But neither is it reducible to a series of fortuitous encounters or fateful actions. in themselves.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
39
and contradictory conditions. from our standpoint. The former has been neglected because it was the product of diffuse conflict and long-term collective action. it bore within it the whole culture of c. simultaneously reproduces and transforms the world. It has assumed a unique concreteness. as we have pointed out? wa~ a drawn-out pro. lTI large parr. It will be evident. hence the former (its institutional order of ~over~ance) might be interrogated through the latter (the routines and habits oriented t?". it has been treated as one ofrhe only permanent points in a shifting world. the body politic and the body personal ace everywhere mtlm~tely related-so much so that their connection has become a~most a truism. to the beat of global _imperatives." the Nonconformist evangelists were moved by humanitarian ideals and imperial dreams at
I I
hom~. to be sure. In this context. dramatic demonstrations of "miraculous" technology. from such major episodes as wars and revolutions to processes of domination. then. the colonial "state" was both a political structure and a condition of being. acn~omous public arguments. Recall our earlier discussion: in particular. How is it that particular persons and events seem. Yet.. As pilgrims to the South African "wilderness. h .38
THEORY. also above)-as resituare it in an unfolding sequence of action. each small thing summoning up a hinterland of signs .

By deciphering the small pnnt of letters. Hegemony. we cannot ignore the role in it of such culturally mediated materialities. Wherever they could. Turner 1990: 1). I!
I
-t
. as well as the inventories of local merchants. As a result." a classical concern of social theory. like all fetishes.d the tlesh and condemned Africans for their "carnal" ways." In his journey through i33U(.istians hoped to create a new moral empire. they set about breaking the "communistic" interdependence of African persons and productive processes. For their part. an unremarked me~ns by which the Chr.dress. religious movements.S of sclfhood. Admittedly. None of this is new. as at home (see Chapter 10). free. often making bodies Into realms of contest. and reports from the field. sexuality. Derrida. Rejecting all traffic with reality as brute "positivism"-as a matter of physical properties imposing themselves on passive subjects (T. and so on) that t~e whites saw as essential implements of modernity and progress. tend also to work on the body as fims et origo of the world (below. where physical facts meet social values. that is. Poststructuralist and deconstructionist writers have perpetuated this form of idealism. Such tangible processes are eminently susceptible to the kind of ethnographic scrutiny that may divulge the hidden hand of history. from D. In their campaign to domesticate the black body. vaccinating. it is given credit for animating social life. in short. will try to impress themselves upon the physiques of their would-be subjects. in the great dialectic of the "social" and the "natural. It is here.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
1
i
Ethnogrllphy and the Historical Imagination
41
and his followers. which uses corporality as the ostensible focus for "explorations in social theory. at least in the cultural sense we give it. scholars have repeatedly treated the human physique as a tabula rasa. least of all when major historical shifts are under way. whatever they do at the level of collective institutions. moreover the colonizers intervened in "native" cooking. H. Often no more than an alibi. tools. locks. thus we perpetuate what Corrigan (1988:371) terms the "Great Erasure of the Body. just as rising classes.. Take our c~lonial evangelists once again: While they talked of spiritual verities that dls?arage. a site. disrupting their rhetoric when least expected. Still. conquerors and coloni~ers see~ typically to feel a need to reverse prior corporeal signs. civilizing goods ushered in new orders of relations-relations both symbolic and substantial-that bound local consumers to an expanding
iI. Yet there is undeniable evidence that biological contingencies constrain human perception and social practice.t?ward material dependency. Durkheim 1947:115f). and counting their citizens. and work." and "social experience. or to remak~ existing world~. ethnic groups. to consume and be consumed by Euro?ean commodi~ies. We discern this process most dearly in the expanding stock of objects (pots." it is named only to be dismissed. for equally elusive constructs like the "person. in turn. Again.40
THEORY. soap. A close reading of the churchmen's diaries and records proves that body work~he effort to retune the physical registers of dark persons through groomIng. Turner 1986). And. has its natural habitat in the human frame. The black body was seldom fur from their thoughts or deeds. That is why movements of social reform. thereby to create a world of "free" individuals. and political associations tend to wear their self-awareness on their skin. find their prime instance in the body. fabrics. in striving to demonstrate thesui generis quality of society and culture.
ETHNOGRAPHY. then. that those who seek to forge empires. The human body. clocks. no enduring object world. These objects moved along the prosaic pathways that bore the traffic of global capitalism and its culture to Southern Africa-and carried their recipi~n~s. Douglas 1970. have expressed their opposition to established conventional) A notable instance of this . States old and new have built their esprit de c~:ps by shaving. and compor~ment-was a crucial mode of colonial production. clothing. Lawrence to Toni Morrison. Bourdieu 1977).nders by cutting their hair and banning their kilts (Brain 1979: 150)." long characteristic of Western scholarly discourse. sexuality. These. has been fetishized. these disruptions yield vital clues.e goods and practices converging on the African anatomy. no mannerism too meaningless to be drawn up into the sweep of history-in-the-making. and Ginzburg would lead us to expect. and SQ(i~! order." "the subject. T1Jrnt"r seldom confronts physicality at all (see T. ThIS was one of the basic methods implicit in the mission. their actions displayed an intense interest in corporeal politics. requisitions. Outside of discourse or the splintering subject or the floating sign there is. And this is the point: Precisely because history is a synthesis of the heterogenous. yet it is strangely elusive-notably so in recent writing on the topic. plastic material to be formed by arbitrary semantic categories (cf van Gennep 1960. hygiene. we were able to trace the ~aths ?f ?ivers. (How different [his is from the frank sensuality with which some creative writers. that frame can never be a struggle-free zone. The ancient English subdued r~cakitra~t Scottish highla. the body has long been seen as quintessential raw material for collective representation (see Chapter 3. Abroad. by a concern with representation severed from material being. Turner 1990:10)-they are unreceptive to the idea that material facts have any role at all in human experience. As our encounter with Foucault. this IS an Instance of a universal process (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 19f): No technique was too trivial. Chapter 3).absent presence occurs in Bryan Turner's The Body and Society (1984). the body actually loses all social relevance. thejr descendants in Africa would attempt to force Tswana converts into the dress of Christian decency. for them. albeit in ways mediated by cultural forms (see Sahlins 1976b. Displaced by the text. the physical object that also becomes a social subject (T. Chapter 3).
We might anticipate. that collective modes of being emerge as dispositions or motives.

above all else. even as would-be subject populations take issue with the manifest m~ssages and overtures that intrude upon them. the sickening England slum an~ the bestial African bush became a model of and for the "other". Such symbolic processes." And the relentless social engineering of twentleth-cent~ry totalitarian states. on the other. along the line that divided the increasingly marked domains. any anthropology of the bourgeois revolution will hav~ to :xplore ~ow homemade hegemonies played into such national (and nationalist) prOJects. indigenous rulers at first resisted the Nonconformists' gentle persuasion. For.ngs did not go unchallenged. prefer-
-. and everyday routines bore
1
the capillaries of a full-blooded imperialism. In the late nineteent~ ~ent~ry. t~uS to make sense of the embracing totahty of which they were part. But that is a topic for another place (Comaroff and Comaroffn. houses. the home was heavily mves ted with elemental values. For costers chiefs and churchmen alike appear to have sensed that it is things like clothing that make"s~bjec~s-again.. t~at colo~ialism was as much a movement of re-formation within British SOCIetyas It was a global gesture. were as much the site of colonial politics as were formal confrontations with government personnel or settler statesmen.all~. often subversive imagination. In. The Tswana "style wars.toohng old values. Together they weave c?mpelhng narratives ofa world historical movement and Its many local variants. Such were the fragments of which novel total. why people may be deeply affected by the media that bear the messages they reject.d. finds a hidden history of the bourgeoisie in the rise of the modern Eur?pean sense of "home. In South Africa.1). an architecture of other~ng for t~e metropole as well as the colony. 10 standardizing an aesthetics of class distinction. Fussell 198?) as in the ~evelopment of formal state institutions. evangelical effort was increasingly superseded by the work of civic-minded professionals (like the engineers and doctors of the Domestic Sanitation Movement. that this whole process v.42
THEORY. We should learn from them. to ~m~rove the domestic lives of the urban underclass.d space: In a world driven by property and propriety. the struggles that occurred around them exhibited all the complexities of the colonial process itself-c-all the multiple motivations. Thus even those Tswana who most strenuously refused the dress of baptism. They seemed alive to. Bodies.[a]: Chaps. of "tradition" and "modernity" they made new Identl~les ~y re. and gender. . Jephson 1907. for example. Such dis~ourse-and t~e phl~anthroplc practice it empowered-stressed the m~rahty of properly mha~lte. or the passport photograph (Elias 1978. Her~. We ourselves draw on these insights in Chapter 10. ignored middle-class moralism and fashioned flamboyant life-styles of their own (Mayhew 1851. Ultimately. many Tswana would rework those designs into provocative patterns. Adams 1991) and by the rise of state schooling. the apparently unrelated attempt back ~ome. whether they be in Eastern Europe. 10 WhIChlocal leaders tried to fight off Western dress and architecture. sanitation. 4. is nowhere more clearly revealed than in their oppressively umform public housing. Later. as we have remarked. Because bodies and domestic space were vital terrains of colonization.5). More immediately. Body work also had Its parallels 10 the realm of architecture and domestic space: Rybczynski (1986). we stress. efforts of ~olonizers to reshape the habits and habitations of nineteenth-century Af~~~ans :tn~. ~he l~~ologlCal spac. sexuality. How are we to interpret . in bot~ senses of the term. why such processes are never reducible to a simple calculus of accommodation or resistance.
ETHNOGRAPHY. London hkewls:. is why new hegemonies may take root amidst ideological argument. indeed. Evangehsts 10 Britain and Bechuanaland expressed rhe.es. each different in critical respects. In both contexts the process would succeed. that each site. poor street traders. There we explore the remarkable similarity between. they often internalize alien cultural forms along the way-without either knowing or meaning to do so. as we show in Chapter 9. redeploying the very signs that the colonizers imprinted on the supple surfaces of their lives.m withi~ a wider historical field.hern Afnc~. or Sout. lay In drawing fragments together and situating the. the indeterminacies and internal. capillaries that ran from the palace gates to the "mud huts" on the colonial frontier. soap and sanitation. are n~t li~ited to colonizing moments. That. contradictions of complex historical conjunctures everywhere. framing middle-class images of personh~od. the fact that the white men's designs on their people were anything but trivial. giv~ng f~ee reign to an independent.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
43
world order.same conviction: that "uncouth" populations could be tamed through the orderly deployment of ~indows ar:d w. In the fantastic fashions that flourished on the frontier we catch a glimpse of the consciousness of ordinary Africans. The mundane practices to which they gave nse speak co~erently to us from the ethnographic record. a push to r~bLUld "savage life" on both continents to the speClficatlons of bourgeois enlightenment. The making of what we term modermty 10 Europe can be read as much in the evolution of table manners. production. those who left little other imprint on the historical reco~d.thls COlr:CIdence] Was it a co-incidence? The answer. once more. Great SOCial movements seem always to achieve both more and less than intended. Reading these poetic practices is by no means straightforward.ities were being constructed. Cockney costermongers. locks and lamps. the effort to colonize bodies and buildi. By tracing out the imaginative linkages among disparate texts and tropes.
I
.:as the ~olitical expression of a universalizing he~em~ny. on the one hand. we were able to see that these seemingly independent instances of domestic reform were complementary sides of one process.

The journey began wit~ the Naparama-or. Whatever we~e thel. These are issues of broad concern within the discipline at present. are not ~o be treated as received categories or analytic objects conjured up as universals from our own folk sociology. But they are restricted to such relatively marginal areas as mathematical anthropology. There are exceptions to this. all the myths of our own disenchantment? The Naparama. They reveal our tendency. were proring " d' d . conjunctures that set the terms of. For the malignancy of primitivism-and its most notable symptom. even in apparently receprive fields." 3. yet does not reduce meaning to either utility or domination." "tribalism. Johnson (1983). how they become the natural atoms of social existence. for example. Kevin Costner). proceeds. to pick and choose what they fancied from the mission. Indeed. for all our obsession wit~ t~e e~ect of anthropology on th~ "other. Sunday.lch Africans were being incorporated into the lowest reaches . WIth It. of course? does "modernity. seeking a conception of culture that recognizes the reality of power. that.. well-intentioned film Dances With Wolves (1990.. a token of a very common type: In a review of the successful.r local meanings. Chicago Tribune.
H1STORIOGRAPH'r'
Eth1UJgraphyand the Historical Imagination
45
. black l~e~tItI~s 10 ~outh Africa were being shaped less by either indigenous or mission mte~tlons than by the gathering forces of the colonial state. by grappling with the contradictions of its own legacy. In sum. is to remind ourselves that the West and the rest. into the distinctions of race.
Notes
1. It is [Q explain [he grt:a[ conjunctures. "mod~rnity" survives in the discourses of our age. Dorris (1991:17) notes that. by treating modernity (and postmodernity) as a problem in historical ethnography. ~t was they who confronted us with the paradoxes and ironies that propel this essay: that. are a powerful metonym of our scholarly predicament. then. and "life-style" were made over lOW signs of gr?ss difference. Note. and relations berween.
v
And so we conclude our voyage into method. especially in modern Am~rican anthropology. see. that the move has nor been wirhour criticism. ~e have a~gued." and other f?rrr:-. 9 December 1990. seeking to transcend them-if only provisionally and for the moment. In order to address them we have appealed to a neomodernist method that takes seriously the message of critical postmodernism yet does not lose the possibility of social science. and a concluding one: Far from being primordial. as a caustic critic on~e put It. and culture by ~h. There is a general point here. Our task is to establish how collective identities are constructed a~d take~on their particular cultural content. ernbodied qualities for those who live them. of the verv . This is not a call for rewriting all anthropology as "We the Nacirema" (Miner 1956) or for making all the world into an imaginary village. "Ioca I" an d "global" worlds. They are both polymorphous and perverse. 1. however. that for all the efforts of generations of ethnographers.44
THEORY. cannot but be interrogated together. pursuing the dialectic of fragment and totality without succumbing to brute empiricism. Take just one example. in short. and so to reflect upon the way in which we ourselves reflect on others. 4.
I
. essential. 2. director. The purpose of estrangement." the discipline has had very limited Impact on our OW? culture.
L
-. both global and local. the radical oppositi. bodies. their representation in the "Yest~rn mass media. Such reflections persuade us that the conundrum of similarity and difference is only to be resolved by turning anthropology on itself. is our challenge. even carroonish panorama against which modern (that is.of a nsing industrial society. Only then will the diverse forms of the mode~n worldindeed.. There is w ides pread evidence that rhis ideological opposition has continuing salience in our culture. They are the social and ideological products of particular processes. as it must. above all. popular and professional alike. Such phenom~na. and eventually .. how they are made real. a mirror in which we see ?urselves divided. that builds on the techniques of cultural history. cultural ecology. white) men can measure and tesr themselves. exoticism-should disappear when we estrange our own culture. . treating irs signs and practices as we would theirs. p. even today. long locked in historical embrace. rather. the very terms of modernity itself-become the subjects of an ethnography of the historical imagination. gender. "ethnicity. at least. .n between prehistorical "tradition" and capitalist. W~ return to this issue later. that takes to heart the lessons of cultural Marxism. and highly specialized forms of nerwork analysis and economic anrhropology.h h .sof Identity reside in tangible practices-as.
ETHNOGRAPH'r'. Section 1. dress. historical anthropology. the mystic
warriors" of Mozambique compel us to consider our wanton ambivalences. This. patently. . to see people as everywhere the same except where they are dlfferent~. is more than a Chicago-cult.and ~s everywhere different except where they are the same. "Indians embody the concept of 'lh~ other'-a foreign. in directing much of our attention to peoples on the ot~er ~ide of the great rift do we not still foster a lurking primitivism? And. rhe processes and practices through which have been fashioned the significant social phenomena of our times. exotic. By the end of the nineteenth century. be dubbed as natural leaders. foundly changed by the world of commodities a rrntte WIt t ese mnocent objects.

. . the term "srarisrical" here in its narrow. the archeology of a silence.g . "[Foucault's] history of madness itself is . concludes Derrida.Smlth (1960) published the more ambitious.1 90: Uf). r-: cogent y or a srructuralisr historical anthropology. their methodological bases were no different from those we will discuss. Indeed. Although approaches lik. Events ~n? rela!l~nswere dls~llld into a generalized account of a political system that persisted as If '? equilibrium. However. until ruptured (by one of the forces specified in a set of abstract "laws": Smith 1960:Chap. 1988). chronicle an act of will. J. of the influence of cultural studies. especially when he situates madness within the trap of Western reason (not to mention the repressive language of psychiatry). more theoretically sophlstlCa. As Derrida (1978:35) notes.. ever since. usually withour question. to emphasize here.. See. a relatively new discipline that has challenged us by applying some of our own concepts and methods to Western phen_omena (see. 29. But It has." 16. Willis 1977. exemplified byCunnison (1959. xxii-xxiv) indicates. It should be clear th. perhaps.
[' lflC1P
r 22. 78) claim that Meillasso~x s ~19?~. on the topic. (1991). Hindess and Hirst's (1975:45f. Nonanthropologisrs might wish to know rhar Raymond Firth was a senior professor of social anthropology at the London School of Economics. Vovelle 1990).14 for brief cornrnenr). 17.ted Govemmmt i« Zazza». history is principally an act of thought. in the first sentence of the prologue to The Go-Between (1956). cf. see Pratt (1986).goes back to rnissionarv '''' erhnographies . For an insightful exploration of the tropes that ethnographic writing shares wirh the earlier genre of travel writing." 9.1 . n. The evidence for this is everywhere at hand." 8. Darnton himself suggests that "it might simply be called cultural history." whose "holistic commitments" defy the "open-ended mystery" of experience. 1972) accounts of Gnro political economy owe less to Marx than to merhodological individualisrn. 1938) .ey's (1985) study of the rhetoric of economICS." he himself perpetuates a straw man: a "realist ethnography. But his exertions have not gone unchallenged. and ostensibly the possibility of "alternarive e:. and Levi-Strauss (1969 es eciall h preface to the second edmon). . Hebdige 1979. also been helped along by a more general erosion of the boundaries between the human sciences. from which the quote is drawn. McCrack. in sustaining the opposition between "evocation" and "representarion. m anthropology.. t~e debates surrounding Alrhusser's portrayal of history as "a process . Some might say that there was also a fourth. HISTORIOG
RAPH
Y
EthfWgraphy find the Historical Imagination
47
5. like Francois Furet. .
ETH NOGRAPH
Y." 15.p yt e that Tswana inheritance and succession are governed by tho.en (1988). Comarolf (1982:143f). lik.e erhnosc ience and mathematic al and cognitive anrhropology have ca lled for new methods and theories. 28. ' 21. 11. . Sahlins (1990). hIS obJe~r was less to disclose t~e ~ogic of stasis than to arrive at the Causes of change. Hartley's original phrasing. who t~k. lor some I lV~rse examples. in McClosk. Recall. " m. more generally. I This has not been for want of trying . 7. These. see Needham (1962). 23. Leach does not phrase the implications of his analysis in the terms that follow However. The comment is made in the specific context of his discussion of Febvre's rrearrneru of Rabelais. then about to retire. see Martin (1987): Lave (1988).at we do not use. . This is not the place to rebUlth:lf argument-w~lCh IS based partly on a misrepresentation of our analysis and partly on a curiously ethnocentric. See. Spitulnik. through Leach's (1954:5£) insistence that ethnographic accounts of social systems. are merely "as if' constructions of the world. which covered a span of 150 years. Iefferson.ro t e classic wnnngs of Schapera (e . In hlSlor~ographlc terms.g. Croce ([1921J 1959:51) contrasts chronicle with history. purely numeIl~al sens~.wlthout . . A few years later . 13.
26. ~~mans and Schneider (1955). Once more. <s. History is living chronicle. ascnpnve . it is not only cultural structuralism that continues to Struggle with the individual and the event.. 228ff). This has been a result. the final object of a history of mentalities is an account of a particular ("popular") culture. Darnron (1985:3) poinrs olit that there is no standard English translation of I'hiItoire des mentalith. from Evans-Pritchard's curt reminder that his facts were selected in light of his theories (1940:261). most were produced within the "custom and conflict" approach of the Manchester School. . I' r one. 6. Marcus (1986:190-191) adds that "experimental" ethnographers "perhaps do not even recognize the priority or privileged val idity of such abstract] y represented realities [as srarisrics]. 10. Our irony will be clear to those familiar with the distinctly ahisrorical debates d ri g the 1950s and 1960s over ~rescriptive marriage systems and. C~maroff 1990:5. Recent wrirings suggest thar such conventions might be shiftirng at Iast. . A very distinguished scholar. roo. This passage on biography and the diary is excerpted in amended form fro J L Cornaroff (1990). 8). ' . 25. The phrase is from Ginzburg's (1980:xx-xxi) brief but acid comment on'those historians who.
c d.4). typically. they have made little lasting impact on the practices of the discipline as a whole. for exa~'pI~.46
THEORY. 1 Thef. chronicle is dead history. an d P ( 9· arsons . have found panaceas for large-scale problems in demographic sociology.. h~wever. We mean It to refer. . culturally barren interpretation of the historical record (see also J. to any inference of prevailing pattern or probability derived from past rates of occurrence. In this respect. We pass glancingly over this terrain in Chapter 4. also Barnes 1951). were no more than narrative dumplflg grounds for everyrhI?S that escaped the deadening vision of the descriptive present. There is an irony lurking here. In contrast to Barnes (195. ~ attn U[~ .. Leach (1951). Smith s procedure remained aggregarive in spirit.e native models. L. the exceptions prove the gen~ral rule here. The same general point has been made in a number of discourses on the human ~clences-most memorably. However. he did much of his ethnographic research on the island of Tikopia in Polynesia.~ although 'IS ] 0fr en ir ib h . 19. to Geerrz's (1973:29) allegorical suggestion that cultural analysis is a matter of"turdes all the way down. in the words of the protagonists. ~7.t .ISSuewith our early work. until recently a predominantly French historiographical movement (see. ." Yet. [hey Aow from his comments on the nature of social change and history (see e g . and Roberts 1976. Indeed. theirs is the kind of account that makes It clear why history needs anthropology every bit as much as anthropology needs history.e.Hall. was "The past is a foreign country: they do things djffercntly there. The most recent to do so are Crowde r.. such studies tended to limit themselves to the role of ethnic historical consciousness in repetitive social processes.. 18. 1954:212. has argue d '0 f . Parson. see Marcus (1986:191)." It is difficulr nor to agree. ~ 12. for example. 14.61. treating them as different "spiritual attitudes." subject or. 24 . genetically. SOCla soennsts h aV~reiterated . which explored "what [people] made of their history" in the course of their social lives. For an especially clear example. For a sample of the Issues involved. Structural Marxism has had similar problems . ' ed 0 primogeniture . L. e.... In part.::pianation. . of course Sahlins (1985) . notion .
'i'I'·
I •!
. as Ginzburg (1980: xiv-xv. Foucault (1967) himself speaks much of silence in his History." It is this last phrase-the image of an act of will-that we seek. 2?. we do not dignify as history an old practice of British structural functionalism: the appending of residual chapters on "social
change" to otherwise synchro?ic ethnographies. over alliance theory. As a result. most notably..

HISTORIOGRAPHY
30. This is what Sahlins (1990:47). "the thing you have seen or the thing through which you have seen it?"
The same conundrum lurks. one thing or many? Has it the capacity to determine social activity. something to be explained? Or is it an explanatory principle capable of illuminating significant aspects of human existence? Does it really refer to "idols of the tribe" (Isaacs 1975). Is the latter an object of analysis. or is it a product of other forces and structures? Do its roots lie in so-called primordial consciousness or in a reaction to particular historical circumstance? And how is it related to race. 31.48
THEORY. on the other. are 49
l. about teacher who gives his students two magnifying glasses and invites them to look at the one through the other. sometimes simultaneously. See Comaroff and Comaroff (1991 :34f). 32. well-known in some quarters. In so doing. detailed chronicles of events (see. and. many of them originating in linguistics. Shillington 1987). who sometimes fault historical anthropologists for not writing "real" histories. Whereas the first implied a static conception of culture-a conception now heavily under attack-both the second and third inform current concerns with the practical. For we are concerned to examine. but by stating five propositions about the nature of ethnicity. political. we shall use a wide-angle lens rather than a magnifying glass. e. or is it in fact an idol of the scribe (Mafeje 1971)? It certainly has been treated in both ways. These propositions. a coup de grace: THERE
Ia
"Of what have you told me.g. we seek deliberately to turn the sage's moral on its head. and shall focus it. ranging from orthodox structuralism [Q J~kobsonian pragmatics an~ Bakhtinian ~ialogics." he asks. the theoretical terms by means of which ethnicity may irself'be comprehended. and nationalism?· In addressing these questions. though. As a result.
ETHNOGRAPHY. the sage delivers his lesson in the form of a question. terms a "synthesis of [he heterogeneous. that is."
2
Of Totemism and Ethnicity
IS A SOCRATIC PARABLE. both an analytic object and its conceptual subject: on one hand.
l
. those processes involving the rise of ethnic consciousness in Africa and elsewhere. These models. When each has told of all he has learned. class. come from a variety of sources.
-. This difference is often not acknowledged by social historians. and rransforrnative qualities of meaning. there is still a notable lack of agreement on even the most fundamental of issues: What is ethnicity? Is it a monothetic or a polythetic class of phenomena. ambiguous. we proceed not by situating our discussion within the relevant literature. moreover. at once. usually unremarked. after RiCOCUl. somewhat eclectically. Contrary to the usual canons of scholarly enquiry. behind the study of erhnicity. on various African contexts..